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> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. I

> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. $20/month for Cloudflare Pro is a steal for what you get. Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
encryptluks2 5y ago
Don't you get tht same for free with GitLab Paged and last I checked Cloudflare was free too for caching static HTML assets?
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > last I checked Cloudflare was free too for caching static HTML assets? If not free then very cheap, as I understood TFA: Wasn't that why they have two separate domains and serve static assets from one of them, to be able to use the cheapest Cloudflare tier for that domain = those assets?
superkuh 5y ago
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > If you're going to centralize in Cloudflare you might as well just skip the hosting the website bit entirely and make a business account on Facebook as your host. These responses are getting bizarre. Facebook pages have nothing to do with web hosting or Cloudflare. Also, hosting on a single server in a single datacenter is, literally, the definition of centralized. Cloudflare distributes the content to a huge number of edge nodes which are spread around the world. How did we end up in this situation where people are calling the distributed solution centralized and suggesting a centralized solution as the alternative?
  - ibic 5y ago
    Yup, I’m still wrapping my head reading these comments, “bizarre” is the word I was looking for.
    - superkuh 5y ago
      Conflating cloudflare's distributed architecture with distributed control is just silly. It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim. "Non-commercial" might be a better way to understand this point of view. Instead of prioritizing profit (the reason for people using cloudflare, it's cheap and good) the idea is to minimize the damage done by large centralizing forces on the internet. So, in the above comment I suggest Facebook as an equal option because it is analogous to using Cloudflare. The intent was to get you to think like a human person and not a business owner or employee on the clock. It's short term gain for long term damage to the internet.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        But then again, if Cloudflare terminates your account, the website is still up; it's just going to be slower, and you're going to pay more to serve the same number of users. There's no lock-in there that I can see.
      - nemothekid 5y ago
        >It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim. As opposed to the CEO of Amazon/Rackspace/your favorite host here who doesn't have the ability to terminate your account? What are you saying? Or are there other non-profit web hosts and CDNs that I missed? If you have a personal axe to grind against the CEO of Cloudflare, just say that.
        Dracophoenix 5y ago
        Superkuh's point is that depending on any single service to protect/host/route your content is setting up oneself up to be Parler'd or 8chan'd. It doesn't matter how good the technology. If you don't any have any control over it, you're one copyright strike or bad mood from a CEO away from being deplatformed. There's.no need to grind an axe to observe how past actions have set the course for the future, perhaps for the worse.
kortilla 5y ago
> I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. You’re talking past the point here. It doesn’t matter how cheap if you’re fundamentally opposed to enabling cloud flare to reach its meat hooks further into the Internet. This is no different from arguments about embedding google analytics or “just paying for windows” instead of using Linux.
- manigandham 5y ago
  CDNs are a commodity business with tons of competition. Cloudflare is winning by offering a better product. You should take issue with all the other companies that have failed to deliver something as compelling.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    I don't think the problem is a specific CDN. Is that everyone ends up using the same CDN, so when Cloudflare has problems, it affects everyone. Same with AWS, large swaths of the internet goes down if AWS does, which sounds great for AWS in marketing material, but less great for the general usability of the web.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > You’re talking past the point here What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you?
  - fivea 5y ago
    > What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you? The OP mention "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the thread attacking those who haven't jumped into Cloud flare's bandwagon by putting up a strawman on how that's only due to ignorance. OP clarified that misrepresentation by pointing out the risk of allowing a single company to control the CDN market specifically and serving web content in general.
bawolff 5y ago
> Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case. Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference? most of that group could probably do a lot of other optimizations that probably count for more.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Anything over 100ms [1] is perceived as not-instant by a user. If you wait 2RTTs with 50ms per round trip, then you've already exceeded this threshold. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-shortest-perceivable-application-response-delay https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-short...
  - bawolff 5y ago
    To clarify, i don't disagree. I just think if your site takes 700ms, is there really a difference between that and 650ms?
    - lsaferite 5y ago
      If that additional 50ms hits your user's bail-out threshold, yeah.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    1.13 seconds to load https://www.google.co.uk/ https://www.google.co.uk/ (even after preloading it and agreeing to their popup) 3.44 seconds to do a search for "donkey"
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference? The common mistake is to pick a server geographically close to yourself, only access it from low-latency connections, and then assume that everyone in the world is seeing the same thing. Or to only visit your own site with everything already in the browser cache. If you're not seeing cold start loads, you're not seeing what every new visitor to your website is seeing. Consider the Photopea.com website. The author explained in a comment below that he spends $60/month to host the site without a CDN. Several of us loaded the site and it took 2.5 - 5.0 seconds to load. He could sign up for a cheap Cloudflare account, reduce the size of his server (due to caching), and the load times for everyone would drop by a significant amount. If you're hosting simple, static content like a blog for an audience that doesn't care about load times, then of course nothing matters. But for modern, content-rich websites (photos especially) it can actually be a substantial improvement to add a CDN even if you have a single fast server. You may not see it, but visitors from distant locations definitely will see a difference.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

encryptluks2 5y ago

Don't you get tht same for free with GitLab Paged and last I checked Cloudflare was free too for caching static HTML assets?

CRConrad 5y ago
> last I checked Cloudflare was free too for caching static HTML assets? If not free then very cheap, as I understood TFA: Wasn't that why they have two separate domains and serve static assets from one of them, to be able to use the cheapest Cloudflare tier for that domain = those assets?

superkuh 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> If you're going to centralize in Cloudflare you might as well just skip the hosting the website bit entirely and make a business account on Facebook as your host. These responses are getting bizarre. Facebook pages have nothing to do with web hosting or Cloudflare. Also, hosting on a single server in a single datacenter is, literally, the definition of centralized. Cloudflare distributes the content to a huge number of edge nodes which are spread around the world. How did we end up in this situation where people are calling the distributed solution centralized and suggesting a centralized solution as the alternative?
- ibic 5y ago
  Yup, I’m still wrapping my head reading these comments, “bizarre” is the word I was looking for.
  - superkuh 5y ago
    Conflating cloudflare's distributed architecture with distributed control is just silly. It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim. "Non-commercial" might be a better way to understand this point of view. Instead of prioritizing profit (the reason for people using cloudflare, it's cheap and good) the idea is to minimize the damage done by large centralizing forces on the internet. So, in the above comment I suggest Facebook as an equal option because it is analogous to using Cloudflare. The intent was to get you to think like a human person and not a business owner or employee on the clock. It's short term gain for long term damage to the internet.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      But then again, if Cloudflare terminates your account, the website is still up; it's just going to be slower, and you're going to pay more to serve the same number of users. There's no lock-in there that I can see.
    - nemothekid 5y ago
      >It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim. As opposed to the CEO of Amazon/Rackspace/your favorite host here who doesn't have the ability to terminate your account? What are you saying? Or are there other non-profit web hosts and CDNs that I missed? If you have a personal axe to grind against the CEO of Cloudflare, just say that.
      - Dracophoenix 5y ago
        Superkuh's point is that depending on any single service to protect/host/route your content is setting up oneself up to be Parler'd or 8chan'd. It doesn't matter how good the technology. If you don't any have any control over it, you're one copyright strike or bad mood from a CEO away from being deplatformed. There's.no need to grind an axe to observe how past actions have set the course for the future, perhaps for the worse.

kortilla 5y ago

> I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. You’re talking past the point here. It doesn’t matter how cheap if you’re fundamentally opposed to enabling cloud flare to reach its meat hooks further into the Internet. This is no different from arguments about embedding google analytics or “just paying for windows” instead of using Linux.

manigandham 5y ago
CDNs are a commodity business with tons of competition. Cloudflare is winning by offering a better product. You should take issue with all the other companies that have failed to deliver something as compelling.
- capableweb 5y ago
  I don't think the problem is a specific CDN. Is that everyone ends up using the same CDN, so when Cloudflare has problems, it affects everyone. Same with AWS, large swaths of the internet goes down if AWS does, which sounds great for AWS in marketing material, but less great for the general usability of the web.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> You’re talking past the point here What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you?
- fivea 5y ago
  > What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you? The OP mention "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the thread attacking those who haven't jumped into Cloud flare's bandwagon by putting up a strawman on how that's only due to ignorance. OP clarified that misrepresentation by pointing out the risk of allowing a single company to control the CDN market specifically and serving web content in general.

bawolff 5y ago

> Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case. Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference? most of that group could probably do a lot of other optimizations that probably count for more.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Anything over 100ms [1] is perceived as not-instant by a user. If you wait 2RTTs with 50ms per round trip, then you've already exceeded this threshold. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-shortest-perceivable-application-response-delay https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-short...
- bawolff 5y ago
  To clarify, i don't disagree. I just think if your site takes 700ms, is there really a difference between that and 650ms?
  - lsaferite 5y ago
    If that additional 50ms hits your user's bail-out threshold, yeah.
- iso1631 5y ago
  1.13 seconds to load https://www.google.co.uk/ https://www.google.co.uk/ (even after preloading it and agreeing to their popup) 3.44 seconds to do a search for "donkey"
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference? The common mistake is to pick a server geographically close to yourself, only access it from low-latency connections, and then assume that everyone in the world is seeing the same thing. Or to only visit your own site with everything already in the browser cache. If you're not seeing cold start loads, you're not seeing what every new visitor to your website is seeing. Consider the Photopea.com website. The author explained in a comment below that he spends $60/month to host the site without a CDN. Several of us loaded the site and it took 2.5 - 5.0 seconds to load. He could sign up for a cheap Cloudflare account, reduce the size of his server (due to caching), and the load times for everyone would drop by a significant amount. If you're hosting simple, static content like a blog for an audience that doesn't care about load times, then of course nothing matters. But for modern, content-rich websites (photos especially) it can actually be a substantial improvement to add a CDN even if you have a single fast server. You may not see it, but visitors from distant locations definitely will see a difference.