Is a little downtime such a bad thing? Trying to avoid some bumps and bruises in your business has diminishing returns.
What are customers going to do? Go to competitor that's also down?
It is extremely annoying, will ruin your day, but as movie quote goes - if everyone is special, no one is.
But if a restaurant loses access to its POS system (which has happened), or you’re unable to purchase a train ticket, the consequences are very real. Outages like these have tangible impacts on everyday life. That’s why there’s definitely room for competitors who can offer reliable backup strategies to keep services running.
Using a different, smaller cloud provider doesn't improve reliability (likely makes it worse) if the architecture itself wrong.
Payment processor being down is payment processor being down.
From a societal level, having everything shut down at once is an issue. But if you only have one POS system targeting only one backend URL (and that backend has to be online for the POS to work) then cloudflare seems like one of the best choices
If the uptime provided by cloudflare isn't enough then the solution isn't a cloudflare competitor, it's the ability to operate offline (which many POS have, including for card purchases) or at least multiple backends with different DNS, CDN, server location etc.
those things shouldn't be fully tied to the internet/intranet anyways.
We got an extremely angry email about it.