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Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

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121–130 of 141 posts

Re: Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

#121
post #28

Not bad financials. Healthy margins, relatively small (in my mind) losses and revenue growing well. At this rate they should be profitable in a year? 2 maybe?

For growth stocks, doesn't this signal stagnation?

Not if revenues continue to grow. I think the market awards grow-at-all-costs companies too much. Profits are the best bell-weather of a healthy company. Yes yes Amazon and the like but they invested cash flows back into the business.

Re: Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

#122

Cloudflare is one of those things that if I'm asked about it I'll sound more positive than astroturfing. Their API's a re great, I've had to contact support once and my experience was good and their rates are certainly reasonable for the scale of projects I've used them on.

Lets not forget Cloudflare practices deplatforming based on political bias.

You don’t have an inherent right to a private company’s services. That extends to a website whose main attraction is a forum that is discriminatory against people of certain races, religions, and sexual orientations, which are protected classes. Political affiliation is not a protected class.

Re: Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

#123

Are there good alternatives to Cloudflare when it comes to DDOS protection? I’m interested in this especially in the perspective of avoiding censorship, either from activist hackers or companies like Cloudflare making arbitrary decisions on allowed and disallowed content.

You’d have a hard time finding a service at scale that wouldn’t kick you off for the kind of things cloudflare does. All the big players remove certain types of content from their platforms.

Re: Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

#124
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG was originally about companies that paid massive engineering salaries, which is why Netflix was included and Microsoft wasn't.

No it wasn't. Cramer coined it due to just FANG (not apple) being totally dominant in their markets and having meteoric rises in stock prices at that time.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech#FAANG

It’s funny (but not unexpected of course) to see the list of variations on Wikipedia.

In Japan they call it GAFA, missing from this list.

Re: Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

#125
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is the "unlimited storage" of the CDN world. They are giving away investors money today with the hopes that down the road they can... something something. In 3-8 years activist investors are going to realize that Cloudflare is the man-in-the-middle data collection point for a percentage of the internet and that a merger with $adnetwork would produce a money printing machine. A handful of "good guys" in eng…

They’re cheap because they have to buy tons of ingress for their ddos protection product, and bandwidth is sold symmetrically at those volumes, so the egress is functionally free to them.

Here is another way to think about it: reset the Cloudflare bank account balances to $0 at the beginning of the month. They provide services and collect payments from customers. At the end of the month when bills come due, all the hand waving and "functionally free" in the world doesn't change the fact they spent more than they made.

Re: Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

#126

Cloudflare is one of those things that if I'm asked about it I'll sound more positive than astroturfing. Their API's a re great, I've had to contact support once and my experience was good and their rates are certainly reasonable for the scale of projects I've used them on.

Lets not forget Cloudflare practices deplatforming based on political bias.

More worrisome than that is that they pledged very specifically that they weren't going to do that and that companies in their position should not do that, a stance I agree wholeheartedly with.

Then they did that.

They had a halfway decent reason for the first one (the racist site they censored was claiming their continued existence was tacit endorsement by Cloudflare, a lie) but once they crossed that line they didn't go back.

Re: Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets not forget Cloudflare practices deplatforming based on political bias.

You don’t have an inherent right to a private company’s services. That extends to a website whose main attraction is a forum that is discriminatory against people of certain races, religions, and sexual orientations, which are protected classes. Political affiliation is not a protected class.

Arbitrary censorship of legal content for consenting adults is still utterly despicable, even when undertaken by private companies against content which is not associated with membership in a protected class.

It's still censorship, it's still paternalistic, it's still bias, and it's still wrong.

Imagine if the phone company denied you access to their privately owned towers because you criticized them on a phone call, or if gmail decided that you aren't allowed to email your own family members links to a certain domain name they deem unsavory or "inappropriate".

(The latter is already the case.)

Re: Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

#128
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have an inherent right to a private company’s services. That extends to a website whose main attraction is a forum that is discriminatory against people of certain races, religions, and sexual orientations, which are protected classes. Political affiliation is not a protected class.

Arbitrary censorship of legal content for consenting adults is still utterly despicable, even when undertaken by private companies against content which is not associated with membership in a protected class. It's still censorship, it's still paternalistic, it's still bias, and it's still wrong. Imagine if the phone company denied you access to their privately owned towers because you criticized them on a phone call,…

That's exactly why phone companies are bound by extra regulations. They are deemed core infrastructure and private censorship from phone networks would effectively be public censorship.

If CloudFlare or Gmail became the only way to communicate online, they would certainly fall under the same regulations, but they're not even close. You can still host any legal website you want and email your family any legal content you want.

Re: Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

#129
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arbitrary censorship of legal content for consenting adults is still utterly despicable, even when undertaken by private companies against content which is not associated with membership in a protected class. It's still censorship, it's still paternalistic, it's still bias, and it's still wrong. Imagine if the phone company denied you access to their privately owned towers because you criticized them on a phone call,…

That's exactly why phone companies are bound by extra regulations. They are deemed core infrastructure and private censorship from phone networks would effectively be public censorship. If CloudFlare or Gmail became the only way to communicate online, they would certainly fall under the same regulations, but they're not even close. You can still host any legal website you want and email your family any legal content…

> You can still host any legal website you want and email your family any legal content you want.

That's not really practically true. Recent examples include Parler and Gmail.

It's very, very difficult to publish online (at scale) anonymously. The vast majority of any western audience uses services like gmail and facebook messenger, which can (and do) censor messages at will.

Re: Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

#130
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s hard to switch your CDN provider in the short term, but it’s feasible that Amazon, MSFT or Google could bump them out of every large enterprise in the long term. That's what I'd worry about, too: for a large company, there's a fairly large cost to dealing with each new vendor. Once Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. has a CDN which is competitive for your needs someone is going to ask whether the extra benefits a…

So next step for cloudflare is to provide a cloud.

It’s a huge investment. Look at how hard it’s been for Google and Oracle.
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