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Is it really all that surprising when a big company that claims to be good but hosts phishing content in the name of free speech does whatever they want, includ

Is it really all that surprising when a big company that claims to be good but hosts phishing content in the name of free speech does whatever they want, including breaking things and not explaining why? I don't trust Cloudflare one bit, and I think everyone should question whether their attempt to re-centralize everything is beneficial to the planet. There are two major problems here: one, the problem itself, which is the deletion of DNS for apparently no good reason, and two, which is the bigger problem, is that it's incredibly difficult to talk to a human about what happened, so there's no assurance it won't happen again. If people want things to be reliable, we've got to stop using companies with which we cannot communicate.

djsumdog 7y ago
Does OP have a free account with just DDOS protection. Does a paid account still have the notice to ask in the community forums first?
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  OP here. I pay them for domain registration, which they offer at cost. I use their free DNS. I disable DDOS protection.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
IMHO (and I know the parent post includes significant difficulties getting back out of Cloudflare), services like Cloudflare may be crucial to decentralization. I can't deal with something like my blog post being frontpaged on HN if my website is hosted in my house, unless I have a good CDN. As a self-hosting enthusiast, something like Cloudflare is one of the best chances of having a plan that competes with "just hosting it in the cloud".
- luckylion 7y ago
  I don't know. Sure, maybe not on your barely-broadband DSL connection, but I'm pretty sure you can run most things on a average shared webhosting, even if you're using WP. You just need to make sure that you have a working caching system in place. It's a gigantic difference even on an apache to just read & send a plain file and invoke PHP & run all the costly code. I don't believe HN should bring down any site that can essentially be cached as static HTML. Cloudflare will only help once your server has gone down with their "Always On" thingy, if you have that enabled. They don't cache HTML by default.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  There's alternatives to Cloudflare that offer affordable-but-not-free CDNs which has always felt less risky to me. I'd rather know I'm the customer instead of the product.
- johnklos 7y ago
  I hear you, but their DDoS services are painful to the rest of the world and to people who want or need to use Tor, and others. I'm talking about their rather political move to re-centralize DNS by shoehorning themselves in to Firefox via DoH, for instance. Their unwillingness to be transparent makes this all the more frightening. Add to that their blatant desire to make money at the cost of doing the right thing (and I'm talking about unambiguous things - is someone going to argue that freedom of speech allows people run a phishing site of your bank?), and you've got a scenario where once they reach critical mass, they will be exercising their position to the detriment of everyone who isn't paying them, similarly to how Gmail, through doing and not communicating, say "screw you" to many small email services. When people who don't use large providers have email issues with Gmail, lots of people have knee-jerk reactions saying that everything should move to the big providers, that people and small businesses should not host their own email, and so on. This is NOT the way the Internet should work, and we should never allow Gmail to just arbitrarily do whatever they want, then accept it as the new normal. If you have more than a dozen megabits of outgoing bandwidth, you can easily host a blog from your home network which can handle a front paging here. Just don't expect to dynamically generate a new copy of the site for every visitor, and if your bandwidth is tight, then host your images on a static server off of your network. Cloudflare is not necessary - perhaps it's easier, but it isn't necessarily best to blindly trust a company that wants to become a monopoly.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > I can't deal with something like my blog post being frontpaged on HN if my website is hosted in my house, unless I have a good CDN. IPFS can work as a CDN, at least for static content that users are willing to seed. This is especially relevant to the "blog post hits frontpage on HN" case. Of course, dynamic content is not quite as easy.

djsumdog 7y ago

Does OP have a free account with just DDOS protection. Does a paid account still have the notice to ask in the community forums first?

iudqnolq 7y ago
OP here. I pay them for domain registration, which they offer at cost. I use their free DNS. I disable DDOS protection.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

IMHO (and I know the parent post includes significant difficulties getting back out of Cloudflare), services like Cloudflare may be crucial to decentralization. I can't deal with something like my blog post being frontpaged on HN if my website is hosted in my house, unless I have a good CDN. As a self-hosting enthusiast, something like Cloudflare is one of the best chances of having a plan that competes with "just hosting it in the cloud".

luckylion 7y ago
I don't know. Sure, maybe not on your barely-broadband DSL connection, but I'm pretty sure you can run most things on a average shared webhosting, even if you're using WP. You just need to make sure that you have a working caching system in place. It's a gigantic difference even on an apache to just read & send a plain file and invoke PHP & run all the costly code. I don't believe HN should bring down any site that can essentially be cached as static HTML. Cloudflare will only help once your server has gone down with their "Always On" thingy, if you have that enabled. They don't cache HTML by default.
vorpalhex 7y ago
There's alternatives to Cloudflare that offer affordable-but-not-free CDNs which has always felt less risky to me. I'd rather know I'm the customer instead of the product.
johnklos 7y ago
I hear you, but their DDoS services are painful to the rest of the world and to people who want or need to use Tor, and others. I'm talking about their rather political move to re-centralize DNS by shoehorning themselves in to Firefox via DoH, for instance. Their unwillingness to be transparent makes this all the more frightening. Add to that their blatant desire to make money at the cost of doing the right thing (and I'm talking about unambiguous things - is someone going to argue that freedom of speech allows people run a phishing site of your bank?), and you've got a scenario where once they reach critical mass, they will be exercising their position to the detriment of everyone who isn't paying them, similarly to how Gmail, through doing and not communicating, say "screw you" to many small email services. When people who don't use large providers have email issues with Gmail, lots of people have knee-jerk reactions saying that everything should move to the big providers, that people and small businesses should not host their own email, and so on. This is NOT the way the Internet should work, and we should never allow Gmail to just arbitrarily do whatever they want, then accept it as the new normal. If you have more than a dozen megabits of outgoing bandwidth, you can easily host a blog from your home network which can handle a front paging here. Just don't expect to dynamically generate a new copy of the site for every visitor, and if your bandwidth is tight, then host your images on a static server off of your network. Cloudflare is not necessary - perhaps it's easier, but it isn't necessarily best to blindly trust a company that wants to become a monopoly.
zozbot234 7y ago
> I can't deal with something like my blog post being frontpaged on HN if my website is hosted in my house, unless I have a good CDN. IPFS can work as a CDN, at least for static content that users are willing to seed. This is especially relevant to the "blog post hits frontpage on HN" case. Of course, dynamic content is not quite as easy.