What would be the issue of being hosted on CF? I believe it is a better option than the rest of the shared hosting industry.. If nothing critical whats the intention of tagging?
CloudFlare is a MitMaaS. Traffic is seen by them because they are in control of the HTTPS certificates, and you have to take them at their word that they do not log content (and even if they're not lying/under a gag order, just metadata is enough for a lot of evil things).
If yes, what's the endgame? Everyone goes back to managing their own servers?
If no, why is Cloudflare the only hosting provider that gets singled out?
With Cloudflare, you may not realize this if you don't know how HTTPS works.
The end game is not necessarily to avoid all use of cloud services, but to be aware of their functioning and their trade-offs, and avoid them where third party spying is crucial to prevent.
These are all reasons I use Cloudflare lmao. Yes I need them to decrypt the traffic because they do various rules and caching for me. That DDoS protection would be pretty naff if they couldn't see the traffic! In one case I really wish they did log, I had to write my own Worker to log the info I needed.
If we were talking outbound proxy then fair enough but it's not like Cloudflare have strongarmed me into using them.. it was me that updated the NS records!
A lot of the list from that site just seem to describe what Cloudflare does, they don't seem to say why each thing is actually a bad thing.
Really does feel like someone's got a hate rod on for Cloudflare and tried to crowbar in as many VPN criticisms without understanding the difference between a VPN/proxy and a CDN.
1 - https://danuker.go.ro/dont-use-vpns.html
2 - https://danuker.go.ro/how-to-protect-your-personal-data.html
They might get hacked? So might my site! In fact if you were a dedicated attacker I'd advise you go after my hosting rather than try to crack Cloudflare, it'll be much quicker. Probably be even quicker to just come at me irl and start snapping fingers until I logged you in as an admin.
They might sell data or censor my site? I doubt they would but if they did start doing so it takes like 20 seconds to update the nameservers. I'm not being held hostage, promise!
The arguments just don't work when it's my site and I've consented to using Cloudflare.
You're welcome to block Cloudflare's networks your side if you don't want to use them of course but I want all of the things they do in between you and my site. That's why am using them.
Users are being denied your site without your knowledge. People using nonstandard browsers (such as for accessibility or security reasons), Tor/I2P for privacy, scrapers, hobbyists and so on. Maybe the content is replaced in certain cases (like governments targeting certain individuals).
> I'm not being held hostage, promise!
If you can easily turn off the CDN and still serve your traffic with reasonable performance, then you are not. Otherwise, you are.
If you got bounced from a Cloudflare fronted site it was more likely the site admin wanted to bounce traffic like you than Cloudflare acting nefarious. Have a browse through the settings some time, see what's available.
I'm pretty sure it's a single toggle in Cloudflare to enable my site on a tor domain too. Can't find the setting right now (on lunch, not used to mobile dash) but I've seen it somewhere.
> If you can easily turn off the CDN and still serve your traffic with reasonable performance, then you are not
Yeah that's easy enough, no worries. The bits I use Cloudflare for aren't strictly site performance related (cache close to the users is handy, of course) - I can make a webserver purr with the best of them.
I can't afford to deploy servers globally and anycast them right now. Not to mention the administration burden. I could, sure, with the right budget. I don't have that budget.
Might be a little pain moving redirects somewhere else but nothing I'd need to cancel plans for.
Note that users can also use Privacy Pass to avoid captchas while remaining anonymous.
(Disclosure: I am an engineer at Cloudflare, though I don't work specifically on anything related to captchas.)