I hate it when in selfhosted circles they recommend CF. Why in hell would you want to be tied to them when you are wary enough to selfhost ¯_(ツ)_/¯
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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It's popular because many people don't have static IP, behind a CGNAT, or simply don't want their residential IP address exposed, so their option is either use a vps as a tunnel (cost money) or use cloudlare tunnel (free). Obviously the free one get more use.
I totally understand the appeal. But I don't usually see people explaining the drawbacks and alternatives. Only a plain and simple "just use CF tunnel" for instance.
Someone I know who works in payments told me they had to go to CF because of the insane amount of DDoS attacks they were facing.
While having three ISPs and mitigating a boatload of DDoS on their own infrastructure they were simply unable to cope with the persistence.
They first tried another provider, but they handled less DDoS than their own internal systems.
Cloudflare wasn’t even sure they wanted them as a customer.
Some of the biggest attacks mitigated by Cloudflare last year (they wrote about it) was this client.
I guess we can say we're not in the selfhosted circles anymore haha
Depends on what you mean by self-hosted. Because basically they are. No cloud providers meet their security requirements (required for their level of PCI certification).
Fair enough, I may have confused selfhosted with homelabs in my answers.
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I feel like this is way overblown. If you tamper with browser headers and user agents, you will be blocked.
If you use incognito mode or TOR, you won't be blocked, and in fact, cloudflare offers onion routes for your website so the traffic is fully secured.
If it weren't for cloudflare, I would have to pay three times the server costs and put twice as much time into managing it.
I really like Cloudfare but yeah this is something I would not want.
How can you like cloud flare despite this?
I can't speak for everyone, but they increase the security and performance of websites for free. I'm sure a lot of people would like to move away from Cloudflare, but every time I try to find an alternative, none of their competitors even come close. Let's say I moved one of my websites to Bunny CDN and transferred 1TB per month, that could increase my website cost by $120 per year.
The sad reality is that Cloudflare can basically do whatever they want until another competitor offers a good free alternative, which is unlikely because Cloudflare has a monopoly. We would effectively be asking millions of websites to pay to use a service with less features.
I'm still looking for a good alternative, so if anyone has one then please let me know.
Is there another way to have all your shit cached for free?
You're wrong to like cloudflare. Thats why.
Great argument.
Been dealing with Cloudflare crap for a while now, thought they just had a hatred of TOR traffic. With Google truing to push website DRM I can only see things like this getting worse.