I am using my domain. Best 10€ ever spent (maybe after Terraria). For just 10€ I get a .org domain name and all the DNS records I want, and I get pampered by cloudflare all the time…
“Oh, you want a distributed reverse proxy? You want a dislocated cache? You won’t TLS without getting a certificate? Block AI on the proxy? Even more stuff? Well guess what, we already make a bajillion dollars from big tech, so you the little guy can have all of that included in your 10€”
Yeah this is why I don’t get the selfhosting communities dislike of cloudflare. Most of the free stuff they give you, you can’t hope to self host. And the stuff you can, you are still free to. There’s the chance they turn on us in the future, but for now they seem pretty reliable.
Now if it’s a dislike of centralization to a single company? I can understand that.
We dislike it because nobody needs it. Nobody here is getting DDoS’d to any extend that needs external protection.
I’m talking anecdotally but it seems to me that all the people who ride-or-die Cloudflare are also self-hosters who aren’t very knowledgeable about self-hosting concepts and just heard that cloudflare protects against all these imaginary problems because they sure do sound scary!
I host a GameVault server with a largeish number of games, but the people who use the server span the entirety of the globe. The number of people isn’t huge, but serving a 100GB file to SEA from the US just isn’t going to be a good time for anyone involved.
The problem with cloudflare is when everyone relies on them, then if something happens to them, they take the whole internet offline… its much like when aws has issues, half the internet just stops working. It undermines the concept that the internet is a federation.
Yeah this is why I don’t get the selfhosting communities dislike of cloudflare.
There’s the chance they turn on us in the future, but for now they seem pretty reliable. Now if it’s a dislike of centralization to a single company? I can understand that.
I think that’s exactly what people are concerned about. Any company that turns into a monopoly should be looked at with suspicion.
Well, I don’t use most of their stuff because I mostly run self hosted stuff that either don’t need their proxy stuff or violate their content policies (you can’t serve movies/video over their proxy, which is reasonable). But if I wanted to I already have all of that at my disposal, without any extra money.
I’ve been serving video to myself remotely via proxy for six years on Cloudflare, never got any email to stop, never got throttled for bandwidth issues. They likely don’t want you to host another version of YouTube, or tank their pipes with data, otherwise they don’t give a fuck what you do
The only questionable stuff I do is stream game files and Stremio over it. Though the game files are “supported” because they come from backblaze I guess?
While the movies I’m talking about are mostly pirated, the content policy applies forbids any video content. It’s a matter of abusing the CDN, not about the content itself. Personally, I doubt they would enforce anything, unless I started pushing large volume traffic (which I’m not anyway), but there’s no reason to get on cloudflare’s bad side for nothing
I am using my domain. Best 10€ ever spent (maybe after Terraria). For just 10€ I get a .org domain name and all the DNS records I want, and I get pampered by cloudflare all the time…
“Oh, you want a distributed reverse proxy? You want a dislocated cache? You won’t TLS without getting a certificate? Block AI on the proxy? Even more stuff? Well guess what, we already make a bajillion dollars from big tech, so you the little guy can have all of that included in your 10€”
Yeah this is why I don’t get the selfhosting communities dislike of cloudflare. Most of the free stuff they give you, you can’t hope to self host. And the stuff you can, you are still free to. There’s the chance they turn on us in the future, but for now they seem pretty reliable.
Now if it’s a dislike of centralization to a single company? I can understand that.
We dislike it because nobody needs it. Nobody here is getting DDoS’d to any extend that needs external protection.
I’m talking anecdotally but it seems to me that all the people who ride-or-die Cloudflare are also self-hosters who aren’t very knowledgeable about self-hosting concepts and just heard that cloudflare protects against all these imaginary problems because they sure do sound scary!
I mean, I don’t use it for DDOS protection. I use it as a cdn, which is something I absolutely cannot self host. At least not on a budget.
I ask with genuine curiosity, what do you need a CDN for?
I host a GameVault server with a largeish number of games, but the people who use the server span the entirety of the globe. The number of people isn’t huge, but serving a 100GB file to SEA from the US just isn’t going to be a good time for anyone involved.
The problem with cloudflare is when everyone relies on them, then if something happens to them, they take the whole internet offline… its much like when aws has issues, half the internet just stops working. It undermines the concept that the internet is a federation.
I think that’s exactly what people are concerned about. Any company that turns into a monopoly should be looked at with suspicion.
Well, I don’t use most of their stuff because I mostly run self hosted stuff that either don’t need their proxy stuff or violate their content policies (you can’t serve movies/video over their proxy, which is reasonable). But if I wanted to I already have all of that at my disposal, without any extra money.
I’ve been serving video to myself remotely via proxy for six years on Cloudflare, never got any email to stop, never got throttled for bandwidth issues. They likely don’t want you to host another version of YouTube, or tank their pipes with data, otherwise they don’t give a fuck what you do
The only questionable stuff I do is stream game files and Stremio over it. Though the game files are “supported” because they come from backblaze I guess?
While the movies I’m talking about are mostly pirated, the content policy applies forbids any video content. It’s a matter of abusing the CDN, not about the content itself. Personally, I doubt they would enforce anything, unless I started pushing large volume traffic (which I’m not anyway), but there’s no reason to get on cloudflare’s bad side for nothing