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Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to

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Re: Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to

#21

Post by PunchyHamster »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #11

Fun fact: a whole bunch of local (as opposed to global: the distinction here is important) Cloudflare-related outages were caused by exactly this thinking: see https://blog.cloudflare.com/going-bgp-zombie-hunting/ and related HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775051 But yeah, if you don't need Cloudflare, like, at all , obviously don't use them. But, who can predict whether they're going to be D…

one DDOS won't kill your business, and you can just turn on cloudflare after that happens, if it ever happens.

Re: Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to

#24

Post by codegeek »

Cloudflare is still down and now its been 5+ hours. Having said that, the thing about "if you don't need to" is not that simple. FOr personal sites/blogs, I can agree but then it really doesnt matter for those. For a real business, the value of cloudflare (As centralized as it gets) is the proxy especially against attacks. The other stuff like CDN/Caching etc are bonus on top.

Unless there is a better option, just asking real businesses (no matter how small) to not use cloudflare is not an option.

Re: Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to

#25

Post by thyristan »

mariopt wrote: post #14
neya wrote: post #8

The lesson I learned is it's OK to put your site with Cloudflare. It's not ok to put your DNS on a registrar who is also on Cloudflare. We got locked out because our registrar is also on Cloudlfare, and now I can't even switch DNS to get the site back up. Keep your domain name registrar, DNS service provider and application infrastructure provider separately.

Fair point but you also get exposed if the dns provider has an outage. Self hosting will also bring its own set of problems and costs.

Traditional non-cloud, non-weird DNS providers have sufficiently long TTLs, not the "60 seconds and then it's broken" crap that clouds do to facilitate some of their services.

Something like TTL 86400 gets you over a lot of outages just because all the caches will still have your entries.

Re: Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to

#26

Post by s1mplicissimus »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #11

Fun fact: a whole bunch of local (as opposed to global: the distinction here is important) Cloudflare-related outages were caused by exactly this thinking: see https://blog.cloudflare.com/going-bgp-zombie-hunting/ and related HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775051 But yeah, if you don't need Cloudflare, like, at all , obviously don't use them. But, who can predict whether they're going to be D…

> Fact is, most sites are better off with Cloudflare than without

Citation direly needed.

In particular I wonder: Who is that total mass of sites where you consider most being better off using cloudflare? I would be curious on what facts you base your assumption. How was the catalog of "all" procured? How are you so confident that "most" of this catalogue are better off using cf? Do you know lots of internals about how strangers (to you) run their sites? If so, mind sharing them?

Re: Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to

#27

Post by codegeek »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #21
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #11

Fun fact: a whole bunch of local (as opposed to global: the distinction here is important) Cloudflare-related outages were caused by exactly this thinking: see https://blog.cloudflare.com/going-bgp-zombie-hunting/ and related HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775051 But yeah, if you don't need Cloudflare, like, at all , obviously don't use them. But, who can predict whether they're going to be D…

one DDOS won't kill your business, and you can just turn on cloudflare after that happens, if it ever happens.

But imagine right now vs you only being down. It sucks right now but most customers are aware of why and we can just say "hey its everyone, just not us". If you had a DDOS attack only on you, imagine dealing with customers then. It is a double edged sword.

Re: Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to

#29

Post by MattGaiser »

shiandow wrote: post #16
zikero wrote: post #3

If we're talking about putting static assets (like basic websites) on their CDN, or moving your backend to Workers, (etc...) you are by definition moving _away_ from single point-of-failure. > Maybe that's the core of this message. Face your fears. Put your service on the internet. Maybe it goes down, but at least not by yet another Cloudflare outage. Well I'd rather have my website going down (along with half the in…

That's a bit like the 'nobody was fired for choosing Oracle' argument, but it does make sense. Still a bit weird to pretend we now have cyber weather that takes our webpages down.

> That's a bit like the 'nobody was fired for choosing Oracle' argument, but it does make sense.

The reaction to AWS US-East-1 going down demonstrates this. As so many others were in the same boat, companies got a pass on their infrastructure failing. Everyone was understanding.

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