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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

#311

Post by nonethewiser »

arjie wrote: post #174

Cloudflare is a great service and nearly free on low traffic sites. This describes a surprising amount of competence among European webmasters of small sites.

Yeah this is basically my reaction. 9/10 use it because it's obviously the best solution.

The real point is what's between the lines: A growing number of European techies are not optimizing for the best technical solution.

At least on hackernews. The observed stat says otherwise, up to this point in time at least.

Personally I love using cloudflare. I am always surprised to see the hate from devs here. I would expect it to be beloved.

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

#312

Post by MisterMunchkin »

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…

AWS isn't aimed at regular people, it's infrastructure as a service. You use it because you need a thousand servers, or a redundant system that can survive a data centre exploding.

If you just need a single server that you don't care about then it's way cheaper to just own it yourself. You probably don't need 99.999999999999999% guarantees for your data, but if you're a bank then you do need those guarantees because losing all of your documents would be disastrous.

Normal people aren't worth anything to them. A company might spend a million a month with AWS, to get that with normal people you'd need at least a hundred thousand customers. And those people are going to spam you with tickets and do silly or illegal things. They're just not worth it. They obviously won't turn money down, but it's not a growth area for them.

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

#313

Post by mitxela »

strictnein wrote: post #272
junofan wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t their whole thing supposed to be spying on foreigners? They seem to be quite successful. There aren’t that many exchanges [1]. Could probably manage with cash, guns, and some know-how. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_poin...

If you just look at the largest 4 of those, you'd have 100Tbps of traffic to monitor, with an average throughput of roughly half of that. That's ~540PB ((50 Tbps / 8 bits) * 86400 seconds/day) of traffic a day with just those four. Add in the rest and you're likely talking ~Exabytes of data each day. And that has to all be processed on site. If someone wants to argue that the NSA is in these facilities I'd be 100% on…

That's nothing a rack full of fast switches can't handle. A rack full of fast switches already does handle it - where do you think the original copy came from?

They will get a copy of the whole feed, but not store all of it - they will have heuristics for selecting interesting traffic.

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

#315

Post by [deleted] »

embedding-shape wrote: post #46
esseph wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by mitxela »

whh wrote: post #310
ARandomerDude wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a joke. If it's electronic the NSA can hack it with impunity, including your ISP. And that's assuming your ISP won't just give them whatever they ask for (unlikely).

I did once theorise that Cloudflare would be a fantastic NSA front.

That's why it is one.

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

#317

Post by youngtaff »

cassianoleal wrote: post #106
thorbutt wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem unique to Cloudflare though

No, but nothing comes close to their breadth and scale.

Amazon and Akamai is their scale, maybe Fastly too

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

#319

Post by fr2029 »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #256
icantevenhold wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck the NSA backdoored our head of states phones - if “NSA wants my data” is your threat model you are pretty much cooked everywhere. Even if you host on your own server and operate everything yourself it’s no big secret that the NSA is listening in on the node/isp level

"The “threat model” section of a security paper resembles the script for a telenovela that was written by a paranoid schizophrenic: there are elaborate narratives and grand conspiracy theories, and there are heroes and villains with fantastic (yet oddly constrained) powers that necessitate a grinding battle of emotional and technical attrition. In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basical…

l2paragraph, aint nobody reading dat

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

#320

Post by epistasis »

MisterMunchkin wrote: post #312
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…

AWS isn't aimed at regular people, it's infrastructure as a service. You use it because you need a thousand servers, or a redundant system that can survive a data centre exploding. If you just need a single server that you don't care about then it's way cheaper to just own it yourself. You probably don't need 99.999999999999999% guarantees for your data, but if you're a bank then you do need those guarantees because…

I 99% agree, but have conflicted felings. There's a mix of services. S3 is and was an amazing resource for normal people. Extremely reliable cloud storage for backup, for distribution, for anything, well, it's a dream. I prefer Cloudflare's offering there in every way, but AWS defined the product category (with its correspondingly ugly API like every single AWS service), and met a core need for many many people. With S3, if you need a ton of storage, it's a terrible deal, and you shouldn't use it. But for a couple hundred gigabytes, go for it.

EC2 is similarly great for normal people as long as you only need a part-time server for a short amount of time. It's hard to beat with a VPS.

Once you get into load balances, event queues, and all the rest of AWS services, well, that's all there to drive lots of money to AWS and to contractors and busy work. MAYBE RDS is a good deal for somebody who really wants to pay somebody else for a managed database. Which turns out to be a ton of users of databases!

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