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

In the late 90s and early 2000s the NSA and other US intelligence agencies underwent massive efforts to basically privatize the gathering of intelligence. Its a lot easier to fund your "total information awarness" initiatives via public markets and private investors than to ask congress for money to do so. So they did just that.

"In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contacted Unspam Technologies, asking, "Do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is?" The DHS' email served as the impetus for Cloudflare, a technology company Prince co-founded with Holloway and fellow Harvard Business School graduate Michelle Zatlyn the following year."

--Matthew Prince's Wikipedia page.

Dont for a second think cloudflare's generous free tier offerings are out of the goodness of their heart. They're a giant fkin MiTM project for the US governemnt. And of course, cloudflare isn't the only one.

> 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.

Realistically, out of the DDoS we typically see, how many are in fact "they had bigger pipes than you"? I've come across that once in my ~3 decade career maintaining infrastructure for websites, some quite popular. Most of the time the attacks are relatively low-effort and easy to stave away, there been one time when the attacker seemed to have basically endless amount of resources, and yes, that time we ended up with emergency calls to Akamai.

But again, those sort of attacks seem to happen seldom, and I don't think people should default to trying to prevent them. Deal with that once you get there, because most websites and services never get there in the first.

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It's seriously good value for small websites. Basically, there is no cost aside from the domain. And for registering and managing domains, they are pretty much the most affordable option as well. And they have a few other things that aren't half bad to use with pretty generous freemium layers.

We used Google's CDN for the last six years or so but it's pretty annoying to deal with and you have to pay for a load balancer every month in order to properly use it. That adds up to quite a bit per year. Even if all you are doing is routing domains to some bucket with a website.

We migrated most of our gcloud stuff to Hetzner beginning of the year. That left a load balancer and a few static websites hosted in Google buckets. I migrated all of that to Cloudflare just a few months ago.

I still have a few buckets in gcloud proxied via a vm in hetzner with a proxied domain in Cloudflare. Not the most elegant route but it works. I might optimize some of that later. At this point, we pay for some Google buckets and not much else in gcloud.

Honestly, Google and AWS need to start paying attention to Cloudflare more. Their complexity is chasing people towards Cloudflare. The hoops you have to jump through with both of them to host a simple website with their CDNs is embarrassing. I've gone through the process with both of them. Although my experience with Route53 is a bit stale at this point. On Cloudflare, getting an new website up and running with a freshly registered domain takes only a few minutes.

Minority of sites have global traffic. This is especially true for non-English sites.

So, while average request may have to travel quarter (not half) of the Internet globe, median request from the set of requests that matter has much lower latency.

Barcelona to Stockholm is about 65ms, ~35ms to Amsterdam, ~43ms to Frankfurt.

HTTP/3 is ubiquitous, you don’t get TCP handshake penalty anymore in major browsers.