Tale as old as time (or at least as the 1970s): nobody ever got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Cloudfare / AWS / Azure.
9 out of 10 corporate decisions are for blame avoidance / ass covering.
Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
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Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#32> The front door is not the whole stack Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN? On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to…
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I was explaining why I believe it's a super popular service. I have no affiliation or stock, just a regular user.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#33Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?
Reduces latency when the cached content is served from a local cdn pop, allows you to absorb some level of DDoS, can absorb traffic spikes more easily so infra can be more static, reduces load on server if assets are dynamically generated on the backend but can are cacheable, some senses can lead to simpler deployment as you serve assets from an object bucket, so no need to deal with keeping that data in your cluster, but that's minor.
There are downsides too, cost, over caching, privacy/security perhaps too.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#34[flagged]
How did you extrapolate that leap of logic? Maybe we suck at business.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#35Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue... Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months. Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more…
> Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier. I'm thinking the opposite might be the way to go here. We already know that "retaliation" comes from the US government regardless if you did something or not, so most of us (Europeans) have stopped pretending there is a way of preventing it. Even more, if we piss off Trump eno…
While I theoretically agree, the issue is that Trump will connect economical issues to blowing up NATO Article 5, leaving NATO completely, or retracting intelligence or Starlink for Ukraine.
So for the most part, the EU has to work slowly and under the radar.
That said, my worry is that we'll be back to business as usual if the midterms look favorable. Even the urgency present during January's Greenland threats was gone after a few months. I fear that we don't have the long-term focus and planning to make sovereignty really happen. But I'd love to be surprised.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#36Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue... Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months. Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more…
lots of efficient government happens outside of a serious crisis, but then you don't notice it.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#37Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue... Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months. Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more…
Yeah, I think only in crypto the non-us providers have a leg up, because running a node just needs an instance.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#38But isn't a CDN a commodity? I.e., you can switch to a different one with almost no effort.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#39I'd also be interested in share of companies using a CDN in the first place. UK has 17k sites, while France and Germany, so countries with about equal and higher population than the UK, have only 4k and 6k sites behind a CDN. I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?
> I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany? Maybe our countries are just small enough to not be overwhelmed by traffic? Most websites I've built and launched for Spanish national companies, that only have other Spaniards as users and customers, haven't needed any CDN at…
nginx can do about 20krps per CPU for static files. You only need CDN if you want to improve time to DOM loaded in locations where time to first byte is over ~100ms and can be improved with local caching.
If all your users are in Spain and you don’t care how fast your site loads for a techbro in California, you indeed don’t need CDN.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
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