What's the cost of annoying people trying to browse to your sites, some to the point where they'll just not bother?
It's like talking about getting murdered - it happens, and there are statistics, but if you're literally expecting everyone to change their whole lives based on the fact that some people are murdered, with zero consideration for the where, why and how, you're doing it wrong.
For a random site from the internet, sure, because a random blog is probably too small to be noticed.
Forums, even relatively niche ones, unfortunately do suffer DDoS from their disgruntled users. (Or competitors of the same fandom. Or from the disgruntled part of a rivaling fandom.)
> It's like talking about getting murdered - it happens, and there are statistics, but if you're literally expecting everyone to change their whole lives based on the fact that some people are murdered, with zero consideration for the where, why and how, you're doing it wrong.
All analogies fail somewhere, but this is probably one of those which easily falls apart. Injuries are probably better. In a random population, there are a relatively small proportion of injuries, but some jobs (like construction) tend to have a significantly higher number of injuries compared to a mean person, in the same manner that a DDoS on a random website is unlikely but certain types of websites are DDoS magnets.
I would like to know if there are alternatives somewhere close to the same cost, where I don't need to use Cloudflare. I don't enjoy annoying customers, or even dealing with sales and marketing, but I have built lots of software where I get to control the technology, and can get a new website up and running in 3 hours, with a ton of built-in functionality. I've spent about 12 years reducing the amount of memory the Umbraco CMS uses, compared to normal installs, and I love that aspect of my career. If I could get my clients to pay more and not use Cloudflare, I would happily go that route, believe me!