Only if you don't know what Cloudlfare does. It protects against all kinds of attacks.
My negative experiences as an end user take priority over any positive experience told to me by a third party in a usage case that doesn't apply to me.
Most of the time that a site is using Cloudflare you’ve likely not noticed and it has improved your experience.
You're all circle jerking around the problem. Proxy DNS and CDN's should be decentralised into standard protocols and not centralised into one company, for what should be obvious reasons (privacy being one of them).
I use CloudFlare on my websites and I feel like I don't have a choice. The fact that it's free to use proxy DNS is the kicker here, and the big selling point behind the DDoS protections. But the milliseconds CF DNS and page caching shave off page loads is also dangerous, because now it becomes mandatory if your websites are actually competing against someone else.
Again: this is a single entity, a single point of failure and in effect a monopoly. We don't just get to use it, we have to use it.
Of course one can't complain unless one has made an effort to do something about it, like I dunno, make a national version of CloudFlare?
Mwahahahaha! Didn't like that one, did you?!? Soon that will be mandatory and departments that investigate will honeypot your ass when they need a some justification for taking your in for a little private interrogation... wait, no, GO BACK!!
Okay, so protocols. Hard as fuck, static as hell. Yes? But, decentralised. Si? DNS proxying and content caches are staples of the modern internet. Content go quick, content go real quick ya. All we need to do is figure out a way to facilitate those things without having to rely on a single company, government body or even access to the many nodes that comprise the internet.
We used to write spec, damnit! We must return to the source. I have been some schmuck on the internet and this was my TL;DR.
If cloudflare wasn't a thing your negative experiences as an end user would be worse
Your experience as an end user is only available because cloudflare exists. That's why your end user opinion doesn't matter, because bad actors are constantly trying to ruin the internet and cloudflare is the gatekeeper. As a server owner I need security at the door to keep our illegal activity. Your opinion of "I don't like security at the door" is dually noted and immediately thrown away.
What?? I thought cloudflare is good. Free Ddos protection, etc.
Single point of failure for the whole internet.
If cloudflare goes down you can just update DNS to not use it …
Agreed, and I would say what cloudflare does for the internet (their work on the IETF, generally letting small sites stay alive without needing an SRE to worry about DDoS attacks, etc) outweighs the general negative possibility of them being a potential single point of failure
We use their CDN, and they do our load balancing for work and they’re great at it.
O.o Do you understand what Cloudflare actually does?
Provides a single point of failure for a large portion of the internet that nobody else has any control over?
Using cloudflare is more reliable than using your own stuff which is still an option that nobody chooses anymore because it's better to choose cloudflare or something similar.
I'm going to go ahead and assume you don't work with internet security in any way, have no experience in web development, and have never attempted to provide web application services to more people than you can count on your fingers, but if you had, cloudflare is mana from heaven.
Honestly, I don't know how any end user who doesn't understand IT and wasn't around before services like Cloudflare were available can say this. They objectively don't have the information or experience to make the claim.
I've been using the intermet since 2003 and have seen no difference except when cloudfare breaks.
Yes, the internet is much bigger than it was in 2003, and it needs more complex protective tools. The fact that you haven't noticed cloudflare when it is working is a sign that it is, well, working.
And the fact that your favorite sites aren't down more often is yet another sign. Downtime due to DDOS attacks alone would be so much greater without cloudflare than downtime due to cloudflare currently is. Your perspective is a pure lack of knowledge and an excess of confirmation bias.
It's the eternal IT conundrum. Something goes wrong: "What are we paying you for?!" Everything goes right: "What are we paying you for?!"
It's best to ignore the users as much as possible and just keep working.
Have you ever self hosted a website? Was that a modern website, or just a bunch of text? Are you experienced with uptime SLAs on multiple services? Have you ever had to deal with a DDOS attack?
There are lots of things that Cloudflare does that requires experience and knowledge to notice or understand. And it isn't even the biggest single point of failure when it comes to the Internet. When AWS has an outage for instance there is a huge chunk of the Internet that goes down.
There are problems with the centralization of the Internet. But this happened for a reason, and it has been so long and these services have been so reliable that people don't even realize what it was like before.
Throwback to when 1.1.1.1 dropped and we all loved couldflare
Cloudflare is having some weird issues with Discord this morning.
So it wasn't just me. Good to know.
Idk, but my homelab thanks it for the free ZTN and workers.
"So you solved the catcha, ok, we don't care anyway."
Literally trying to figure out if Cloudflare or tailscale would be the best way to go. The memes have spoken
Cuckflare: host loves it, everyone else hates it
