When I tried CloudFlare, they injected a JavaScript into my site that was bigger than my entire site. That was a couple of years ago, but I can't bring myself to trust them anymore. I also don't like their growing control over the web.
We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
211–220 of 426 posts
Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, I’m still wrapping my head reading these comments, “bizarre” is the word I was looking for.
Conflating cloudflare's distributed architecture with distributed control is just silly. It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim. "Non-commercial" might be a better way to understand this point of view. Instead of prioritizing profit (the reason for people using cloudflare, it's cheap and good) the idea is to mi…
It's interesting - I see Cloudflare a rising force against network attacks more than its CDN properties. It will become the defacto centralized network. Not sure if I like that philosophically, but practically and as a engineer, most enterprises will choose to get their DDoS, WAF, Zero Trust products. Networks are the most vulnerable part of the internet infrastructure. Cyber warfare isn't just a talking point on a 60-minutes episode, it is a real threat to large businesses and they'll opt for centralized control over decentralized risk. They'll keep Cloudflare CEO in check, if not the shareholders/BoD.
Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
#213I like the idea of cloudflare as a OSPF style file cache, but what about putting 80TB in a colo-facility on a 1U box and paying $80/month to host that yourself? is it cheaper to use Amazon S3?
I think you’ve got the 80TB item confused with storage. They are talking about 80 TB of transfer over the internet in a month. I doubt they have 80TB of assets laying around on Vercel. That would cost them an arm and a leg with Vercel I’d expect.
Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference? The common mistake is to pick a server geographically close to yourself, only access it from low-latency connections, and then assume that everyon…
> Consider the Photopea.com website. The author explained in a comment below that he spends $60/month to host the site without a CDN. Several of us loaded the site and it took 2.5 - 5.0 seconds to load This is a conclusion i am extremely doubtful of. Ping time new york tokoyo is about 180ms. So lets say as a worse case the ping time to the single server is 180ms (its probably not that bad), and lets say the latency t…
> So using cloudflare on a cache hit (best case), you save something like 160ms per roundtrip.
Per packet. If you're doing a cold start, you'll pay that latency cost several times over: first the TCP handshake (3 roundtrips), and then the TLS handshake (2 more roundtrips). That's 800ms of extra latency before you even get to sending the first HTTPx request.
Cold start latency matters a lot.
Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloudflare is currently operating at a close to break-even loss.
Sure, because we're hiring like crazy to build new things. As we said during our last earnings call, we intend to stay at break even as long as we can achieve extraordinary revenue growth and continue to deliver innovative new products. The more relevant number for this comparison would be our gross margin — much we have to spend on things like bandwidth and servers to service our customers divided by the revenue tho…
Have anything in infrastructure/operations/Linux sysadmin type areas?
Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
#216I handle ~150TB and 26M page views for ~$500 by simply renting a few dedicated servers at hetzner. And if I didn't need quite a lot of processing power (more than average website), it would be much lower. I only need so many servers for the CPU power, not traffic.
This! Hetzner root servers, there is nothing else I know on the market that comes close in price/power ratio when you use the "Serverbörse". I run multiple low traffic websites, databases and a heavy traffic elk instance + my complete homelab in proxmox / docker for 48€ a month and there is even room for more. Highly recommended!
What is your strategy for dealing with server failure?
Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. You’re talking past the point here. It doesn’t matter how cheap if you’re fundamentally opposed to enabling cloud flare to reach its meat hooks further into the Internet. This is no different from arguments about embedding google analytics or “just paying for win…
> You’re talking past the point here What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you?
> What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you?
The OP mention "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the thread attacking those who haven't jumped into Cloud flare's bandwagon by putting up a strawman on how that's only due to ignorance.
OP clarified that misrepresentation by pointing out the risk of allowing a single company to control the CDN market specifically and serving web content in general.
Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
#218Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. You’re talking past the point here. It doesn’t matter how cheap if you’re fundamentally opposed to enabling cloud flare to reach its meat hooks further into the Internet. This is no different from arguments about embedding google analytics or “just paying for win…
I figure helping Cloudflare get it's meathooks in the internet offsets all the really big companies that have their meathooks in, or at any rate doesn't worsen the real problem.
> (...) helping Cloudflare get it's meathooks in the internet offsets all the really big companies (...)
What? No. Cloudflare reported a revenue of half a billion dollars, and already controls about half the CDN market.
Let's put things in perspective: in comparison with Cloudflare's business, AWS is a minor player and an underdog with less than half of Cloudflare's market share.
Cloudflare is by no means a small company or an upstart or a David among Goliaths. Cloudflare is in fact and by far the Goliath of the CDN world.
Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. You’re talking past the point here. It doesn’t matter how cheap if you’re fundamentally opposed to enabling cloud flare to reach its meat hooks further into the Internet. This is no different from arguments about embedding google analytics or “just paying for win…
CDNs are a commodity business with tons of competition. Cloudflare is winning by offering a better product. You should take issue with all the other companies that have failed to deliver something as compelling.
I don't think the problem is a specific CDN. Is that everyone ends up using the same CDN, so when Cloudflare has problems, it affects everyone. Same with AWS, large swaths of the internet goes down if AWS does, which sounds great for AWS in marketing material, but less great for the general usability of the web.