Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ciphercue.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 388 posts

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

#151

Post by atakan_gurkan »

aivisol wrote: post #144
shevy-java wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not living in Europe, right? Because while I agree that China is a problem, the USA is a much, much bigger problem for Europeans than China is right now. It's mostly the USA that wants to depict China as the main problem when in reality the USA behaves in a hugely aggressive colonial manner. Trump just makes this more obvious, but that has been the case way before Trump already.

Please speak for yourself. Not everyone in Europe thinks US is bigger problem than China. For many China is far bigger geopolitical threat since they openly support Russia in its current war.

Honestly, I had the impression that the current US regime also supports Russia in its current war. Did they not ask Ukraine to give the already occupied land and then some? As far as I remember, that was in a form almost like an ultimatum, too. China might be a bigger threat, but I find it hard to believe that this would be the reason.

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

#153

Post by zerozerotwo »

shevy-java wrote: post #83
zkmon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> US domination of "tech" is near total. Not quite when considering China having the tech freedom they wanted. Also switching internet services is far easier than switching physical supply chains. The only thing that might be hard to switch is the part of the interent backbone infra that is controlled by USA.

You are not living in Europe, right? Because while I agree that China is a problem, the USA is a much, much bigger problem for Europeans than China is right now. It's mostly the USA that wants to depict China as the main problem when in reality the USA behaves in a hugely aggressive colonial manner. Trump just makes this more obvious, but that has been the case way before Trump already.

This is such a hilariously delusional comment. Who do you think is financially backing the Russians who bomb your cities?

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

#154

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection

A CDN not, and certainly not a global one.

But unfortunately, you absolutely need DDoS protection, especially as a business. Too many shady actors and skiddies pulling off extortion/protection racket scams - a complete and utter lack of telco regulations, AI, tons of unsecured IoT devices and shitcoins truly have made for a terrible mixture.

Sure, a 50€ a month server at Hetzner, OVH or whatever is more than enough to host a website. If you're not running some NodeJS garbage, a 5€ VPS can be enough. But at the first sign of you being targeted by a troublemaker, your hoster will cut you off just to protect their other customers.

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

#155

Post by bell-cot »

jamesnorden wrote: post #138

You have to ask why they're so "generous" with giving away free services.

Looking back over the past 3-ish decades, becoming utterly dominant in some part of "essential" stuff on the internet has a way of paying off big.

Or, they discuss their free stuff at length here - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000147733326....

(That is Cloudflare's 10-K for calendar 2025 - scrutinized by serious investors, and with heavy penalties for lying.)

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

#156

Post by ghoul2 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #58

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…

I also believed that, but at least for India, this doesn't work in practice. Unless you atleast do the 25$ pro plan, cloudflare routes even india-to-india, hell, even mumbai-to-mumbai and aws_mumbai-to-cloudflare_mumbai traffic via Marsaille!! Not even Singapore. The unstated reason is that indian transit is expensive, though I fail to believe its cheaper to go from mumbai to marsaille and back to mumbai.

I am guessing the real reason (and at this point I am discounting incompetence - this has been true for years, so they are aware). You switch to the pro plan for the zone and everything now routes within india, 100s of milliseconds of latency saved.

Its even worse for workers and workers AI and embedding search. I found multiple seconds of latency, all vanishing the moment the zone is on pro plan (It seems R2, workers, workers AI - none of them are deployed in an India POP - unconfirmed, of course, cause there is no way to actually communicate with cloudflare).

Now 25$/month isn't much - though it does change calculations compared to "FREE!!" - but I would have liked to know this going in, instead of discovering this after having made the commitment. Seems like a deliberate dark pattern, to force people into the pro plan.

Shame, really - I love the CF stack(workers and DO are just so fantastic to build on), but these shenanigans, plus the utter refusal to provide ANY level of support, keep souring me on them.

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

#157

Post by carlosjobim »

watwut wrote: post #146
carlosjobim wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Trump talks about doing the anti colonial thing and withdrawing troops from European soil, the response is outrage. But I've learnt that iPhones and social media is American imperialism, but thousands of troops in dozens of military bases on European soil is not, somehow.

> thousands of troops in dozens of military bases on European soil is not, somehow Presence of allies is not colonialism. Threat to annex Greenland is. Threat to annex Canada is. Keeping pet dictator in Venezuela and taking their oil is. On the other hand, when Germans, France and other European soldiers came to Greenland to defend against an American threat, it was not colonialism. It was being allies. > and withdra…

Which way is it: Allies or a threat? How much double-think can you fit within a comment?

To me the question is crystal clear: No country should want to have foreign troops permanently stationed on their soil, no matter how good friends they are.

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

#159

Post by mopsi »

pocksuppet wrote: post #65
jillesvangurp wrote: post #58

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.

  > The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers.
That depends heavily on the kind of site you're hosting there.

I have a small site on Cloudflare that lists a brief introduction of a sawmill, its operating hours and contacts, and a map that advises which roads to take to reach it. Everything's public already. There's some very modest value in tracking who visits the site, but with popular operating systems leaking like a sieve on the client side, that fight was lost a long time ago.

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

#160

Post by ExoticPearTree »

pocksuppet wrote: post #65
jillesvangurp wrote: post #58

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.

> The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers.

I doubt the NSA is gobbling up all the CF traffic because maybe, maybe they will find something of interest.

Can the NSA make CF "mirror" your website traffic to them if you are of interest to them, most likely yes.

I am not that paranoid to think that my website of a few corporate pages is of interest to the NSA.

Post reply on HN