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What about akamai? They are a much larger CDN (no one talks about it on HN because they are not a startup). I agree with your assertion that it will become a si

What about akamai? They are a much larger CDN (no one talks about it on HN because they are not a startup). I agree with your assertion that it will become a single point of failure with many web properties but also I think that HN has a sort of filter bubble on startups (for obvious reasons) and I'm not sure cloudflare is as big as people make it out to be. Also, Google has 8.8.8.8 which could be for the same thing and has similar problems (large scale data collection, singe point of failure).

Nullabillity 9y ago
When was the last time Akamai forced you to fill out a CAPTCHA?
- yladiz 9y ago
  Cloudflare has never made me fill in a captcha.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    If you'd like to experience this, just use Tor.
    - gbraad 9y ago
      Or open it from China (where the captcha is even blocked). The irony....
- Operyl 9y ago
  This morning, actually. https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/brute-force-attacks.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/brute-force-attacks.j...
JimDabell 9y ago
> no one talks about it on HN because they are not a startup I think it's simply that a lot more people have used Cloudflare because it has a free plan, whereas Akamai is expensive in comparison.
fludlight 9y ago
CloudFlare publishes their pricing. Akamai doesn't. Dealing with salespeople is a massive PITA. They're not going to tell me anything that's not in the docs or support forums and I don't want to spend a week negotiating. I've seen many others make this point on HN over the years. Maybe Akamai only focuses on large enterprise customers while CloudFlare also goes for the SMB market. IDK. The HN crowd seems to work at SMBs (startups included) or at companies big enough to operate their own CDN.
- tbrock 9y ago
  Why do startups that sell to other startups hire sales people to do this instead of just having clear pricing? Obviously they must extract some value for the business but the experience of haggling with some sales bro to get a decent price leaves me so annoyed with services that I usually skip signing up when it’s the only option. > Let’s talk about solutions! No thanks. I just want to insert dollars and get the service.
  - kbaker 9y ago
    It's because just having a pricing page doesn't give any feedback as to whether the price is correct or not. A salesperson could at least ask 'what is a better price we can shoot for?' or 'what features do you really need?' whereas a visitor to a pricing page just disappears.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      You can A/B test pricing, Amazon does it all the time. You can have a pricing page that says "If this seems off to you, let us know and we'll talk" like Papertrail does. There are plenty of options, but if you're worried about customers walking away, you're losing tons of them by making them call you first.
      - manquer 9y ago
        Pricing is hard. Your platform may have 1000's of features, not all of which all your clients want or can pay for. Packaging into simple groups may not possible until you have the volumes to figure out what works Many clients need specific features that you don't have yet, pricing calculation becomes very complex, and depends on customer to customer as well. We will charge more to some customers simply because we know they need a lot of hand holding and special assistance
MR4D 9y ago
So, now we have..... 3 ..... single points of failure ? I’m clearly missing something, but why doesn’t that solve the problem? And I’m keeping the scope of my comment on the technical side, and ignoring the business/antitrust potential.
- freehunter 9y ago
  As opposed to further up the stack where you rely on just a small handful of backbones that fail in spectacular ways far more than Cloudflare does. L3 and AT&T and all the networks that just route traffic through China for no reason at all. As opposed to hosting everything on AWS, so half the Internet goes down when they have a no-so-uncommon outage. I don’t think Cloudflare is that much of a bottleneck in comparison. Not to mention 3 points of failure is the definition of “not a single point of failure”.
booblik 9y ago
Akamai has 7,500 employees, Cloudflare has 500.
emmelaich 9y ago
For completeness remember Google's 8.8.4.4 google-public-dns-a.google.com 8.8.8.8 IPv6 address 2001:4860:4860::8888 google-public-dns-b.google.com 8.8.4.4 IPv6 address 2001:4860:4860::8844

Nullabillity 9y ago

When was the last time Akamai forced you to fill out a CAPTCHA?

yladiz 9y ago
Cloudflare has never made me fill in a captcha.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  If you'd like to experience this, just use Tor.
  - gbraad 9y ago
    Or open it from China (where the captcha is even blocked). The irony....
Operyl 9y ago
This morning, actually. https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/brute-force-attacks.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/brute-force-attacks.j...

JimDabell 9y ago

> no one talks about it on HN because they are not a startup I think it's simply that a lot more people have used Cloudflare because it has a free plan, whereas Akamai is expensive in comparison.

fludlight 9y ago

CloudFlare publishes their pricing. Akamai doesn't. Dealing with salespeople is a massive PITA. They're not going to tell me anything that's not in the docs or support forums and I don't want to spend a week negotiating. I've seen many others make this point on HN over the years. Maybe Akamai only focuses on large enterprise customers while CloudFlare also goes for the SMB market. IDK. The HN crowd seems to work at SMBs (startups included) or at companies big enough to operate their own CDN.

tbrock 9y ago
Why do startups that sell to other startups hire sales people to do this instead of just having clear pricing? Obviously they must extract some value for the business but the experience of haggling with some sales bro to get a decent price leaves me so annoyed with services that I usually skip signing up when it’s the only option. > Let’s talk about solutions! No thanks. I just want to insert dollars and get the service.
- kbaker 9y ago
  It's because just having a pricing page doesn't give any feedback as to whether the price is correct or not. A salesperson could at least ask 'what is a better price we can shoot for?' or 'what features do you really need?' whereas a visitor to a pricing page just disappears.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    You can A/B test pricing, Amazon does it all the time. You can have a pricing page that says "If this seems off to you, let us know and we'll talk" like Papertrail does. There are plenty of options, but if you're worried about customers walking away, you're losing tons of them by making them call you first.
    - manquer 9y ago
      Pricing is hard. Your platform may have 1000's of features, not all of which all your clients want or can pay for. Packaging into simple groups may not possible until you have the volumes to figure out what works Many clients need specific features that you don't have yet, pricing calculation becomes very complex, and depends on customer to customer as well. We will charge more to some customers simply because we know they need a lot of hand holding and special assistance

MR4D 9y ago

So, now we have..... 3 ..... single points of failure ? I’m clearly missing something, but why doesn’t that solve the problem? And I’m keeping the scope of my comment on the technical side, and ignoring the business/antitrust potential.

freehunter 9y ago
As opposed to further up the stack where you rely on just a small handful of backbones that fail in spectacular ways far more than Cloudflare does. L3 and AT&T and all the networks that just route traffic through China for no reason at all. As opposed to hosting everything on AWS, so half the Internet goes down when they have a no-so-uncommon outage. I don’t think Cloudflare is that much of a bottleneck in comparison. Not to mention 3 points of failure is the definition of “not a single point of failure”.

booblik 9y ago

Akamai has 7,500 employees, Cloudflare has 500.

emmelaich 9y ago

For completeness remember Google's 8.8.4.4 google-public-dns-a.google.com 8.8.8.8 IPv6 address 2001:4860:4860::8888 google-public-dns-b.google.com 8.8.4.4 IPv6 address 2001:4860:4860::8844