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Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

ciphercue.com

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Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#41

Post by expedition32 »

noir_lord wrote: post #4

Since 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…

Compared to the Spanish empire, Napoleon and Hitler the Americans are but whiny children. It would be one last hurrah for my country to break away.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#42

Post by microtonal »

dwroberts wrote: post #14
cbg0 wrote: post #9

> 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…

[flagged]

I think they articulated the underlying issue well. Cloudflare is too attractive for individuals and small businesses. For instance, my personal website has a healthy amount of traffic, but means nothing at CDN scale. I considered moving to a EU CDN company, but they all have per GB/TB pricing. It would cost me nothing now, but what if my site comes under attack or someone starts hotlinking a large file? So, I stay with Cloudflare because with their free plan I don't have to worry about such contingincies.

I would even be happy to pay for it, but for individuals and small business the 'black swan' events that could bankrupt them will keep them from switching to a pay-as-you-go service.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#44

Post by philipallstar »

microtonal wrote: post #35
embedding-shape wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 g…

I don't think the EU has the capability to work fast and just is opting not to.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#45

Post by vaylian »

pluc wrote: post #20
vaylian wrote: post #10

Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?

This article being down/slow is a great response.

Not to discount the experiences that other have, but the site loads fine for me.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#46

Post by embedding-shape »

esseph wrote: post #22
embedding-shape wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your use case. If you have a very inefficient backend (maybe legacy project?), you have massive amount of traffic (say 100K req/s or above) or you really must have sub-500ms latency absolutely everywhere in the world, then it might make sense to slap a CDN (or similar) on top of that. In pretty much any case outside of that, it makes no sense to waste the time, money or effort on CDNs. But, all the CDN com…

Data scraping. If anything else, the AI machine wants near constant streams of new data, even if it already checked with you 30ms ago. A CDN helps immensely. Also keeps you from getting DDoS'd if you did something like run it off your home connection.

Your webserver most likely have "rate limiting" built in already, which you can configure to act based on lots of variables typically. Set a limit of 1 req/s or whatever, and you've stopped 99% of all DDoS you'll encounter on the public web. If your visitors get cranky, up it to 10 req/s and you still are preventing most of the "abusive traffic", granted your backend/website isn't completely upside down when it comes to performance and resource usage.

CDN is something you do once you run out of options, not something you should reach for immediately, it makes no sense in most cases of just hosting a website.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#47

Post by glimshe »

dwroberts wrote: post #14
cbg0 wrote: post #9

> 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…

[flagged]

My PM buddies speak like this about any subject.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#48

Post by jarco »

Havoc wrote: post #2

Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there

I tried them with our small company. They seem ... young. Support on discord is not something I can sell to our owners. We sent a ticket that activating some of their services instantly caused bad bots to scan our site, and never got a decent reply on that. Their attitude does not inspire confidence and for that reason we scrapped them as an option. Never actually found a good European option besides them, which is sad.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#49

Post by embedding-shape »

microtonal wrote: post #35
embedding-shape wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 g…

> Even the urgency present during January's Greenland threats was gone after a few months.

There are troops deployed on Greenland right now ready to defend the island. The threat is not gone from the minds of the people there or in the rest of Europe just because you stopped reading about it on CNN or whatever.

Edit: I got curious if this part is even possible:

> leaving NATO completely

Apparently not. Congress enacted a specific prohibition in 2023, now codified at 22 U.S.C. §1928f. It says that the president may not "suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw" the US from the North Atlantic Treaty unless either two-thirds of senators present consent, or Congress passes an Act authorizing it. It also prohibits federal funds from being used to carry out an unauthorized withdrawal.

Seems some parts of the US has indeed managed to setup defenses against such idiocracy.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#50

Post by viraptor »

embedding-shape wrote: post #16
cbg0 wrote: post #9

> 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…

> now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website ... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires…

> you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you

This works for cases where the traffic takes too long to process. Once you get 3gbit traffic on your 1gbit link, you can't do anything yourself - the only thing that can save you is a bigger pipe.

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