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Honest question: I've never really understood the back of the napkin math of how Cloudflare functions economically, which I feel would go a long way towards my
by michaelbuckbee 6y ago
Honest question: I've never really understood the back of the napkin math of how Cloudflare functions economically, which I feel would go a long way towards my understanding of why/how they were able to become such an integral and generally positive part of the Internet.
Did they have some crazy in to get cheap bandwidth? Did they bet big on bandwidth prices falling? Did they figure something else out that nobody saw? Do they just to a tremendous job of migrating sites from free to paid plans?
- jgrahamc 6y agoRead our S-1, it's all in there. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519222176/d735023ds1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...
- potency 6y agoOff topic, but any regrets on getting involved in content policing? It always sat with me as wrong and a disturbing precedent that an internet backbone service such as yourselves would make it their business to shut down unsavory yet legal speech.
- nix23 6y agoWikileaks and Piratebay are customers of CF, so your 'legal speech' must be really something. Any links?
- largbae 6y agoMaybe GP is referring to 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3, the DNS resolvers that filter malware and malware+adult content respectively? Both are optional alternatives to the unfiltered 1.1.1.1 DNS service if so...
- 236dev 6y agoThe only ones I can think of are The Daily Stormer and 8chan
- potency 6y agoCloudflare CEO Matthew Prince spoke to CNBC upon banning Daily Stormer: “We were worried that people would say, ‘We won’t work with you anymore,’” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told CNBC. “We had to have the conversation now because at some point we’ll be a public company. We had to prompt that discussion,” said Prince, who added “we want to be ready internally by July 2018,” for a possible stock offering. CNBC Link: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/24/cloudflare-ceo-matthew-prince-explains-why-he-booted-the-daily-stormer.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/24/cloudflare-ceo-matthew-princ... Editorials discussing the event: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-to-draw-the-line-on-hate-speech-online/2017/09/01/025eab10-89da-11e7-a50f-e0d4e6ec070a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-to-draw-the-li... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/cloudflare-daily-stormer-charlottesville.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/cloudflare-daily-...
- fennecfoxen 6y agoYes, and then they banned 8Chan just the same (I think? One of those sites where a shooter talked to his friends) as soon as they were under pressure.
- debacle 6y agoLikely the reddit model. Don't ban anything until it hits you in the pocket book.
- LordDragonfang 6y agoIf I'm not mistaken, 8Chan also hosted a lot of illegal content in addition to that "legal speech".
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoAnd yet, it was not for anything illegal that they were taken down.
- kbenson 6y ago
- creeble 6y agoLikewise many DDoS-for-hire services, un-ironically. Dosninja.com for example (there are dozens, though not all Cloudflare protected). Unlike "free speech" sites, the entire point of a DDoS-for-hire site is to suppress speech. Nice to be able to get it both ways!
- amylka 6y agoIt will remain at the politically correct shutdowns. Look at the list of countries they are doing business with.
- triceratops 6y agoCan't the free market sort that out?
- IAmEveryone 6y agoWhy is it a precedent? Nobody was under the illusion that it isn't technically possible for them to shut down some customer they don't like. Nor was/is there any debate about the legality of doing so, So the only reason for continuing to work for/with violent anti-semites was that they wanted to. Until, at some point, they changed their mind. HN has a strange infatuation with this idea of avoiding responsibility by pretending to be powerless. But it's neither morally sound nor logically or legally coherent to pretend to be bound by some principles that are entirely of one's own making.
- Reelin 6y ago> Why is it a precedent? Precedents aren't limited to the legal system. Their actions changed the expectation (ie established a new precedent) for their behavior going forward. > So the only reason for continuing to work for/with violent anti-semites was that they wanted to. Or entertaining broader ideals surrounding freedom of expression? Or perhaps seeing the inherent dangers of living in a society dominated by public outrage? Or something else entirely? > Until, at some point, they changed their mind. Due, by their own admission, to financial concerns. Concerns which wouldn't exist if they and all their competitors were legally required not to discriminate based on otherwise legal content. > HN has a strange infatuation with this idea of avoiding responsibility by pretending to be powerless. I don't see that anywhere in this comment section? Rather, I see people objecting to actions which are legal but which they feel should not be.
- morrbo 6y agoII love cloudflare. It has really helped out with several sites/projects that I have worked on and the service is top notch. I am also an investor. I tend to invest in stuff which I use a lot or trust/respect the employees. Weirdly what made me really invest is the level of geekiness on the company. I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome". I just wanted to say don't change. Your lz4 implementation, aes gcm golang optimizations have directly benefitted me. Coupled with really high quality post mortem articles, articles on interesting things like compression, encryption, networking, a few random articles (the privacy focussed file system recently comes to mind, written at the same time I was making my own distributed fs) just leave me with a lot of respect for the culture there. I was worried a bit when I saw the initial IPO that the free tier would leave (despite promises it wouldn't) but that doesn't seem to be the case. Literally the only bad thing I've seen on the site is recently you switched from recaptcha to a new one that I had a real tough time with logging in today - it was a bit glitchy on my pc. The only suggestion I thought of as well would be a simple "maintenance mode" similar to the "I'm under attack mode" which would allow those of us without super-ha to quickly toggle on something to pop up a "sorry server"/site is down form maintenance page without having to mess with our proxies/web servers. Anyway I know this comes across as totally kissing-ass but I just wanted to say thanks to someone who actually works there. Everyone fat fingers stuff every now and again,don't sweat it.
- benmanns 6y agoIf you use Cloudflare workers, you could put together a maintenance page with a simple script + Cloudflare Workers KV as a toggle switch. It would cost $5/mo if you're not already using workers.
- renewiltord 6y agoIt's a bit of a sad story, but maybe you'll like this read about one of the guys who laid the foundation for their tech and his sad decline: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/ https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline... I really liked the stories of his skill when he was in his prime. Very inspiring.
- Arnt 6y agoCongratulations with growing so big. Why aren't there dozens of lookalikes by now? I mean CDNs that will let you override the origin's cache instructions and do a decent job of DDOS protection, and whose feature list otherwise looks a little like Cloudflare's.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amelius 6y agoYes, why isn't the CDN a commodity?
- Kalium 6y agoCDNs are expensive to build, and often not very useful to customers until you've built out a large portion of it (actual hardware required, you can't just run it atop AWS). On top of this, much of the money is in Enterprise. So you've got to compete with Akamai, AWS, Fastly, Incapsula, Cloudflare, and several other notable ones to get any customers to speak of. There are smaller CDNs out there. You can find them readily enough.
- amelius 6y agoYes, but for a customer it's trivial to swap out one CDN for another, isn't it?
- Kalium 6y agoDepending on how you integrated it and how deeply, it may be trivial. Certainly going from one DNS-based CDN to another can be pretty easy - a Cloudflare / CloudFront swap could be quick. Which suggests to me that CDNs are already a commodity in some ways.
- aspir 6y agoOne answer - It's much, much harder to build and operate a global network infrastructure that it might seem. It's also even harder to invent some sort of "killer feature" or other genuine innovation on the experience. You're likely not using Cloudflare simply for commoditized pipes alone, but for other features or designed experiences in their offering. A second answer - there are a bunch of bottom-barrel commoditized pipe services. You likely haven't heard of them because they're so generic. They've existed before Cloudflare, and more will be created in the future https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-intelligent-traffic-management/country-reports.html https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-intelligent-traffic-m...
- michaelbuckbee 6y agoHey John, thanks for taking the time to reply. Respectfully, the info in the S1 (flywheels, etc.) seem to be what sustains you _now_. Maybe a better question is "how did you identify and kick off that flywheel?"
- eganist 6y agoDon't take this as being glib, but isn't this the entire point of funding rounds? Demonstrate growth and talk about a few approaches to creating a business model that you're investigating, which then brings investors on as they're betting you'll find one that'll succeed?
- chacham15 6y agoThe relevant excerpt seems to be here: Market Opportunity We believe our platform disrupts several large and well-established IT markets. The key markets that are addressed by our platform include VPN, internal and external firewalls, web security (including web application firewalls and content filtering), distributed denial of service (DDoS) prevention, intrusion detection and prevention, application delivery controls, content delivery networks, domain name systems, advanced threat prevention (ATP), and wide area network (WAN) technology. From our analysis based on IDC data, $31.6 billion was spent on those products in 2018, which is expected to grow to $47.1 billion in 2022, representing a compound annual growth rate of 10.5%. We also are actively developing new products to address adjacent markets including compute, storage, 5G, and Internet of Things (IoT) that are not included in the estimate of our addressable market.
- thepangolino 6y agoThat’s just general market analysis. It doesn’t say anything about what their hedge is. Or was it simply that the existing actors were that inefficient/price gauging.
- kbenson 6y agoLOL, I'm sure it is, but referring someone that is wondering about the "back of the napkin math" to an approximately 250 page S-1 filing is sort of ludicrous.
- nabeards 6y agoSince you’re here, any response to the top comment re: inaccessibility to disabled persons?
- NorwegianDude 6y agoI don't really know, but I guess the biggest feature in the past was protection against DoS attacks. Bandwidth isn't expensive compared to what most people are paying for it. Cloudflare is paying for the infrastructure as it is to handle attacks, so why not use it? As long as it doesn't affect paying customers then it's great marketing.
- rasengan 6y ago> Did they figure something else out that nobody saw? I may not have a full scope of the history, but my own experience with DDoS protection was quite different. Whilst providers offered anti ddos protection through GRE tunnels and dedicated machines behind DDoS appliances and a heavy null route hand, Cloudflare had a simple few-click solution that worked at the web application level making things a lot easier and, also, allowing for features like caching, and thus, CDN benefit from a global network. Further, they've maximized performance on their machines, and as a result, Cloudflare is wicked fast. Cloudflare does what it does really well and has built additional services on their global network that make a lot of a sense and provide a lot of value. Hats off to CF.
- aclelland 6y agoThis has been my experience too, CF is just so easy to migrate to and to configure once you're there. If AWS was able to offer a single click "DDOS protection and CDN" feature with similar pricing and features as Cloudflare then I'd consider it since most of our infrastructure is on AWS but at the moment they don't offer anything nearly as competitive. Just the Cloudfront bandwidth costs alone would dwarf our total infrastructure costs.
- michaelmior 6y agoIndeed. I think I understand the argument claiming Cloudflare is a SPOF. However, if you're actually dealing with DDoS attacks with any kind of regularity, you're likely to have better uptime with them than without.
- henriquez 6y agoCloudflare is a relatively cheap "lite CDN" for developers who want caching without putting in any work. This becomes a gateway drug for Cloudflare's more expensive plans once you outgrow the free plan. It quickly adds up; I worked for a company that wasn't even on an enterprise plan and was spending hundreds of dollars a month on Cloudflare just because they had a lot of domains. My reservation with Cloudflare is the concept of letting a third party MitM my SSL traffic. That and it's more expensive than a cheapo CDN like Stackpath if all you really care about is CDN (and Cloudflare isn't even really a good CDN, just a quick hack to speed up small static files).
- Kalium 6y agoIn my experience, it's extremely rare to find a CDN that doesn't expect to do TLS termination. My understanding of TLS is that it's exceptionally difficult to cache content if you cannot see into the requests. Perhaps I have overlooked something?
- henriquez 6y agoRight, with Stackpath they do TLS but not necessarily on the primary domain. You don't have to point your nameservers if you don't want to. So you can set them up on a subdomain and use their fake SSL to serve purely static files (if the file doesn't exist on CDN at the time it's requested then their system will pull it directly from your server via a private subdomain, serve it to the client and store it for next time) So in this way it's possible to setup CDN with shared SSL for purely static files but not the app server itself; you don't have to give the keys to the whole kingdom so to speak and it's cheaper than Cloudflare at the basic level.
- Kalium 6y agoLet me see if I follow. Auto-provisioned TLS (misleadingly termed "fake SSL") on the front-end for delivering static contents and caching. A private subdomain with a pinned cert not managed by the CDN to deliver static contents to the CDN. And a third subdomain for the application itself that's not going through the CDN. I was under the impression that the same result could be achieved with Cloudflare, or indeed nearly any CDN. Was I mistaken? Though you may not actually need a secret, private subdomain for static files with all CDNs. Again, please let me know if I've made a mistake somewhere. I'd love to learn something this morning.
- ThePhysicist 6y agoAs far as I understand it it's a freemium B2B model: If you're small you probably can get away using the free tier. Then when you get bigger you outgrow the free plan, either because you want specific features or because your bandwidth becomes too high. That said bandwidth really isn't that expensive, at least if you're buying it at the scale that Cloudflare does. Many people seem to be used to the bandwidth prices of the large cloud hosters, which are really insane and have been marked up by a large multiplier to disincentivize people to transfer their data elsewhere for processing.
- catsdanxe 6y agoThe NSA/CIA have a huge hidden budget. They are known to invest in startups. Why try to break crypto when you can just pay some tax payer money to large corps to get them to convince sites to mitm themselves.
- zenincognito 6y agoWorth noting that cloudflare does a poor job of identifying and allowing crawlers specially Google. I have a site with 1 mil URLs , nothing big and every time you turn on cloudflare it reduces the crawler to 1k visits or less per day. If you compare your logs for visits for Google and Bing with CF turned on/off there is a huge difference. Suffice to say, that in over 5-6 projects I have added CF to, it's never worked out in my favour.
- ebg13 6y ago> I have a site with 1 mil URLs , nothing big A million URLs isn't big?
- ksec 6y agoI wonder why. May be CF should work with Google and allow those crawlers?
- shawncampbell 6y agoDo I understand correctly that you're suggesting Cloudflare reduces organic search traffic due to restricting search engine crawlers?