Turns out half the internet has a Single-Point-of-Failure called Cloudflare (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Turns out half the internet has a Single-Point-of-Failure called Cloudflare (2020)

easydns.com

This seems like it's some 'muh free speech' post from this new account in response to Cloudflare removing KF's services...

The major thing to worry about with Cloudflare is what happens if it goes down, when, and how often. It doesn't go down often enough for me to worry about it, but also: 99.9% of people reading this probably use Cloudflare's free tier - as do I! If you want constant uptime, pay for it.

Also, probably best for discussion of CF vs KF to go in that thread.

> This seems like it's some 'muh free speech' post from this new account in response to Cloudflare removing KF's services...

You read over the publishing date (2020).

They're referring to the HN user who posted this as "new," I assume, not the article.

he means the burner account that submitted this article is doing so to downplay KF's boot from Cloudflare by invoking the sentiments of an old article that really doesn't justify its decision.

phantom_of_cato had all of his replies flagged and removed in today's thread.

*they, but yes

> phantom_of_cato had all of his replies flagged and removed in today's thread.

Flagging on HN is mostly done by the users, not by the moderators.

nope there are definitely moderators on HN

There are, they don't do most of the flagging though.

That article was about an issue with the internet centralizing around Cloudflare aka showing why everyone using Cloudflare is a problem.

Then don't use Cloudflare.

Sure, but we can also criticise it on the side. Corporations aren't beyond criticism.

> This seems like it's some 'muh free speech' post from this new account in response to Cloudflare removing KF's services...

Personal attacks are clearly against HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Always wondered why the ISPs themselves don't compete. They're clearly well positioned. They have a lot of money. Are they that cheap and unable to get expertise to build out this infra?

Yeah this is a big opportunity. Cloudflare’s service could become much more commoditized in the future which would help deal with the threat of them monopolizing a critical access layer of the internet. Of course scale is required for freemium so it’s not smalltime stuff but there seems to be a lack of good alternatives.

They do, but not the way you think. They partner with CDNs and large service providers to cache content in their datacenters for them, saving on peering/infra cost , enhancing UX and padding their bottom line. Most of the time they even pay for it. They’re also smart enough not to expand in businesses that aren’t their domain of expertise and/or may come with legal hurdles.

2020. Surely everyone has addressed their dependence on single services like this now. And any moment now I'll get my unicorn.

I suspect someone might have posted this in response of the KF situation.

Entirely reasonable. I could draw a parallel to Postel's "hey point root servers somewhere else" stunt too.

https://www.wired.com/2012/10/joe-postel/

I use Cloudflare on my sites, for both DNS and CDN.

The reason it's so popular isn't because of any conspiracy or vendor lock-in, but because it's a great product.

Back before I used them for DNS, any change I made to my records would literally take hours to propagate through the network and be reflected globally. Now, the updates are instant.

Their CDN product literally halved site load time back on my old shared host (less of an issue now I'm on DigitalOcean), while at the same time greatly increasing the number of concurrent users it can handle without generating spitting out Error 500 (internal server error).

If I need to disable their cache for whatever reason, it's as simple as logging on and ticking a single checkbox in my dashboard.

This is all for the free tier - God knows how amazing the paid product would be!

I find CloudFlare’s “verifying your browser” messages (in an infinite loop if you have the audacity to block cookies or use an ad blocker) much more infuriating than their rare outages.

Run your own DNS servers folks!!! Yes, your app servers won't really have much DDOS mitigation in-place but the chances of that happening to "you" specifically is about the same as your datacenter losing power.

Forgive my skepticism, but two strongly anti CF posts in 12 hours?

I have witnessed the mass conversion of normal people to extremism in the US in the last 10 years, and this is not it. If it is an attempt, it is too soon.

Anti-Cloudflare = extremism?

I thought AWS held this title.

That's the other half.

Maybe outsourcing one's security needs is "dumb" when it comes to something like the internet since "trust" is hard won and quite expensive.

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