71–80 of 389 posts
But isn't a CDN a commodity? I.e., you can switch to a different one with almost no effort.
For it to be a commodity there would be no good reason to pick Cloudflare over any alternative and this absolutely isn't the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 asked the Swedish Prime Minister this question almost verbatim on Reddit two days ago and he responded. The answer was ... understated. https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/1w8p0z4/comment/p84...
Question:
> Hello, Sweden (and Europe) is facing three almost existential risks over the coming term of office that we have never really had to take a position on to the same extent before. The climate. A new UN report from last week has shown that El Niño will probably contribute to between 3 and 4 degrees of warming in addition to last year's heat wave. I live abroad and we had 44 degrees warm for a couple of days this summer (2025). It was also over 30 degrees in Norrbotten for over 3 weeks. Unbearable. How do you prioritize this against the many other budget items? How should we now prepare for what will inevitably lead to an IPCC 3-4 degree scenario?
> AI. AI development is just going faster and faster. At my workplace, we have already replaced many employees with AI-driven processes. We buy all our computing capacity from the US and China. There are no European alternatives and it is not possible to buy Swedish. What do you want to do to, at the European level, prevent us from ending up in the AI lap of the US and China in 5 years? Where should we buy chips from when all manufacturing takes place in Taiwan, Korea, China and the US? We risk a situation where Swedish office workers are rarely replaced with US AI tokens. Surely this must be an initiative at EU level?
> American foreign policy. Trump's second term has been tumultuous, to say the least. We were probably as close to the brink of war in Europe (Greenland) as there is in living memory. Trade agreements are being torn up, sticks are being put in the works for Gripen agreements, etc. Even when he is gone, the illusion of America as a close ally has probably finally been broken in the eyes of many Swedes, myself included. What do you want to do to reduce Sweden's and the EU's dependence on foreign superpowers?
Answer:
> There is a lot in this. A completely unique geopolitical time - both militarily and economically - presents a small country like Sweden with important choices. NATO was one of them. We are now cooperating with all our neighbors around the Baltic Sea, for example our own defense build-up, another example, the largest since the 50s. And all the new free trade agreements when the United States messes up world trade.
> The climate is also one of these, and what the EU is now doing together is the single most important thing, in parallel with Swedish fossil-free energy. We can make ourselves completely national energy independent with the new Swedish nuclear power programme. German energy policy, I think, proves why this is needed, in addition to the wars in the Middle East.
> EU: no single EU issue is more important than our support for Ukraine and increasing European competitiveness in relation to both the US and China. And it starts with the internal market - where 70 percent of all Swedish goods exports end up. If it can be as good for services including digital services, it would be good for both the EU and Sweden. But I am genuinely concerned that Europe is lagging behind.
> last China: we will have an intense autumn regarding a common European response against China to get "level playing fields" when it comes to trade. Today's situation is not sustainable. even extremely free trade-friendly countries like Sweden see this. we should not have protectionism but the same opportunities for the EU in China as for China in the EU. We are not there now.
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 balanc…
The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers. Cloudflare is the LG TV of websites, but it's worse because we've known it has an always-on microphone and speech-to-text for over a decade and we still keep using it for some reason.
You're replying to a comment talking about migrating from Google, so I assume you're claiming this is more of a risk with Cloudflare than Google (or other American providers like AWS)?
If so, what's your source for that claim?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> 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…
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 balanc…
The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers. Cloudflare is the LG TV of websites, but it's worse because we've known it has an always-on microphone and speech-to-text for over a decade and we still keep using it for some reason.
Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I think their delusion is probably in what they consider a small business. A lot of people on here, given their work experience, think of small as something with a few hundred employees.
If you're building a tiktok competitor, that's definitely going to require an enterprise plan, even if you have only 4 employees.
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…
I think many millions in the EU want to. The problem is that the current EU "politicians" are just US lobbyists. You can see it when Leyen signed the surrender treaty with her Overlord-buddy Trump. You can not fix the EU with such lobbiysts in place - and it's not just Leyen alone. Look at Merz - the guy basically is a tool used by US companies. He is not the brightest but very loyal to the USA. More than to the people who voted for him (and now curse themselves for having made such a big mistake).
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.