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> 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,

by cbg0 8d ago

> 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 help keep you online and now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business.

dwroberts 8d ago
[flagged]
- glimshe 8d ago
  My PM buddies speak like this about any subject.
- cbg0 8d ago
  I was explaining why I believe it's a super popular service. I have no affiliation or stock, just a regular user.
- microtonal 8d ago
  I think they articulated the underlying issue well. Cloudflare is too attractive for individuals and small businesses. For instance, my personal website has a healthy amount of traffic, but means nothing at CDN scale. I considered moving to a EU CDN company, but they all have per GB/TB pricing. It would cost me nothing now, but what if my site comes under attack or someone starts hotlinking a large file? So, I stay with Cloudflare because with their free plan I don't have to worry about such contingincies. I would even be happy to pay for it, but for individuals and small business the 'black swan' events that could bankrupt them will keep them from switching to a pay-as-you-go service.
embedding-shape 8d ago
> 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 CDN and that somehow $200/month is a small amount of money for a small business.
- cbg0 8d ago
  What you're paying for is business continuity, not for them to host your site. I know you can host the site itself on much cheaper infrastructure.
  - cyphar 8d ago
    If your site is static you can host it on CF pages for free with unlimited* egress. * of course it's not unlimited unlimited but I've not heard of anyone being cut off.
- viraptor 8d ago
  > 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.
  - embedding-shape 8d ago
    > 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 away, there been one time when the attacker seemed to have basically endless amount of resources, and yes, that time we ended up with emergency calls to Akamai. But again, those sort of attacks seem to happen seldom, and I don't think people should default to trying to prevent them. Deal with that once you get there, because most websites and services never get there in the first.
    - pocksuppet 8d ago
      For small businesses? None. Nobody is ddosing a cake shop and if they do, the cake shop doesn't really care enough, because their business is in the store not online, and can afford to let the ddoser waste their money for a few days.

by cbg0 8d ago

dwroberts 8d ago

[flagged]

glimshe 8d ago
My PM buddies speak like this about any subject.
cbg0 8d ago
I was explaining why I believe it's a super popular service. I have no affiliation or stock, just a regular user.
microtonal 8d ago
I think they articulated the underlying issue well. Cloudflare is too attractive for individuals and small businesses. For instance, my personal website has a healthy amount of traffic, but means nothing at CDN scale. I considered moving to a EU CDN company, but they all have per GB/TB pricing. It would cost me nothing now, but what if my site comes under attack or someone starts hotlinking a large file? So, I stay with Cloudflare because with their free plan I don't have to worry about such contingincies. I would even be happy to pay for it, but for individuals and small business the 'black swan' events that could bankrupt them will keep them from switching to a pay-as-you-go service.

embedding-shape 8d ago

> 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 CDN and that somehow $200/month is a small amount of money for a small business.

cbg0 8d ago
What you're paying for is business continuity, not for them to host your site. I know you can host the site itself on much cheaper infrastructure.
- cyphar 8d ago
  If your site is static you can host it on CF pages for free with unlimited* egress. * of course it's not unlimited unlimited but I've not heard of anyone being cut off.
viraptor 8d ago
> 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.
- embedding-shape 8d ago
  > 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 away, there been one time when the attacker seemed to have basically endless amount of resources, and yes, that time we ended up with emergency calls to Akamai. But again, those sort of attacks seem to happen seldom, and I don't think people should default to trying to prevent them. Deal with that once you get there, because most websites and services never get there in the first.
  - pocksuppet 8d ago
    For small businesses? None. Nobody is ddosing a cake shop and if they do, the cake shop doesn't really care enough, because their business is in the store not online, and can afford to let the ddoser waste their money for a few days.