17 ms·

I'm so sorry everyone. Or: why I'm switching to Cloudflare

221 points by d4a 5y ago

jgrahamc 5y ago
You are more than welcome to use our free products. That's what they are there for!
- njsubedi 5y ago
  Whoa! One of the few CTOs that you can randomly run into on the internet, but still I have nothing to ask or tell about their service. Thank you for what you’re doing!
  - jgrahamc 5y ago
    You're welcome!
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  Are you John Graham-Cumming? If so, hello and thank you for POPfile! Didn't know you worked at CF. :- )
  - jgrahamc 5y ago
    I am. And yes, I did create POPFile (https://getpopfile.org/ https://getpopfile.org/). And yes, I do work for Cloudflare, been there a while... https://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/programmer.html https://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/programmer.html
- GreenWatermelon 5y ago
  HN is just that one unique place where you could run into high profile persons in random threads. Pretty amazing community.
- deathanatos 5y ago
  Finally, a random HN Cloudflare thread! How am I supposed to reach out to Cloudflare support? If I start at cloudflare.com, and click "Support", "Contact Support", that takes me to the Cloudflare Dashboard. In the upper corner, there is "Help Center" and "Cloudflare Community". In the bottom, "Contact support". "Contact support" and "Help Center" both lead to the same page: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us ; that page has a giant "Submit a request" button on it. Clicking that takes me … back to the dashboard. I suppose there is the community, but the UI seems to imply there is a "file ticket" thing, but the UI seems broken. Also, your RDAP implementation — is the API (not just the web UI) to it something people are free to use? Additionally, it's not quite RDAP; it doesn't conform to the RDAP RFC (RFC 9083) in the eventAction string used for expiration dates. (It calls the eventAction "Expiration Date"; the RFC calls it "expiration". Parsers are picky.)
  - jgrahamc 5y ago
    Are you logged into your account?
    - deathanatos 5y ago
      Yes.
  - stavros 5y ago
    Seems like a UI bug, yeah. After you get back to the dashboard, if you click "support" again, you go to a different page, where you can actually contact support. For me, it ended up on this URL: https://dash.cloudflare.com/<myzoneid>/support https://dash.cloudflare.com/<myzoneid>/support Basically, append /support to your dashboard URL.
- infocollector 5y ago
  Curious: How does Cloudflare pay for the email routing network bandwidth + hosting charges it incurs for its free services? I ask because it seems Google ran this for a decade and then found out that it is time to charge for it.
  - jgrahamc 5y ago
    We have a lot of bandwidth for our CDN and DDoS services.
  - eastdakota 5y ago
    This is the most common misconception about our business. Bandwidth, when you're small. But the scale economics in bandwidth are unlike almost anything else. As you get more and more bandwidth, the cost per bit drops until, in most places, it will go to zero. If you know those dynamics are present in a market, you can forward price knowing that you'll get to those scale advantages. Today, servicing a new free customer is virtually costless to us. So, to this college-bound customer and others, welcome.
mmastrac 5y ago
CloudFlare works so well for so many use cases it's hard to justify not using it. I previously used it to get to my internal home network using the standard product and IP range whitelists (plus some additional secrets). I currently have it running on top of some ancient legacy appengine apps to clean up domains/URLs, add a caching layer and keep my costs at basically zero overall (workers doing a little bit of work as well). I'm tempted to ditch Google's legacy free workspace product using the email forwarding as well. It's like Twilio: there just isn't anyone near from a competitor perspective. As long as they keep improving, they are so far ahead it's their game to lose. And just to clarify: I do everything on the free tier.
- jgrahamc 5y ago
  I'm tempted to ditch Google's legacy free workspace product using the email forwarding as well. Go on then: https://blog.cloudflare.com/migrating-to-cloudflare-email-routing/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/migrating-to-cloudflare-email-ro...
  - readams 5y ago
    Any solution for sending email? Just forwarding mail is not remotely the same thing; there's a million ways to do that.
    - ttul 5y ago
      Stay tuned. MailChannels will be announcing a free email sending option for Cloudflare Workers customers shortly. I will post it up on HN.
      - ttul 5y ago
        https://community.cloudflare.com/t/send-email-from-workers-using-mailchannels-for-free/361973 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/send-email-from-workers-u...
    - jgrahamc 5y ago
      Not at the moment.
AdamH12113 5y ago
>Unfortunately, I doubt the tech department at the university would appreciate or allow me to poke holes in their firewall to forward 443 and 80 to my server. So how on earth am I planning on keeping my server up during this time? When I was in college (2000-2006) you could fill out a form to request to run a server. I'm not sure how common that is today, but it's at least worth asking about.
- icedchai 5y ago
  Back in the mid 90's, everyone on my college residential network had static, public IPs, no firewalls or filtering. Different times.
  - nisegami 5y ago
    This was still essentially the case at my university ~3 years ago (and likely still is). There was a firewall by default, but it was a simple form to fill out to have it disabled.
  - vehemenz 5y ago
    True in the early 00's as well.
    - nomel 5y ago
      Usually resulting in a Windows computer being powned before patches could even be applied: https://it.slashdot.org/story/04/08/17/1347214/survival-time-for-unpatched-systems-cut-by-half https://it.slashdot.org/story/04/08/17/1347214/survival-time... Note: The graph url is dead.
      - vehemenz 5y ago
        Yes, I remember this well. I put an unpatched Windows 2000 machine on the network, and the system logs were littered with intrusion attempts—more than 500—after being online for a few minutes.
  - 5y ago
javajosh 5y ago
One of the hosting providers should just give this kid a $5/mo VPS in perpetuity. Call it a marketing spend. His heart is totally in the right place - I really respect the thought he's put into his options, and contemplating the downsides of modern day options. The threat model he's worried about is quite real, and I don't think we really know how bad things can get when so much data is accumulated in one place. That said, I hope he doesn't give up the search for an alternative method, even if it's stashing a box in a hidden part of the library.
- merlinscholz 5y ago
  There already are tons of options for free VMs. I have 4 Oracle Cloud instances with 4 cores, 24gb RAM and 200gb disks total for this exact same use case. I suppose the author prematurely assumed all VPSs are costly or does not want to set up the networking themself.
  - javajosh 5y ago
    I did a google search for "free tier vps" and sure enough, it does seem like the standard is roughly $300 in credit (AWS seems to do it differently). Which is enough for a small vps-like-thing for 5 years, or 4 large instances for a few weeks.
    - gzer0 5y ago
      The credit for AWS expires after 1 year. Azure credits expire in 90 days. GCP expire after 30. Whether all used or unused.
      - lostmsu 5y ago
        At least Oracle and GCP have always free instances, that never expire.
    - agwa 5y ago
      GCP's $300 credit is in addition to letting you run one free e2-micro instance indefinitely: https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier/ https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier/ "Free Tier: All Google Cloud customers can use select Google Cloud products—like Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery—free of charge, within specified monthly usage limits. When you stay within the Free Tier limits, these resources are not charged against your Free Trial credits or to your Cloud Billing account's payment method after your trial ends."
familymart 5y ago
intrepidhero 5y ago
I'm curious why the requirement was to not port forward? Seems like the author values the independence of self hosted stuff and port forwarding is a pretty common solution.
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  The server will be on campus internet, so they can't forward anything.
  - intrepidhero 5y ago
    Right. Thanks. I was distracted by a coworker and should have read more carefully.
- yunohn 5y ago
  2nd line of post: > Unfortunately, I doubt the tech department at the university would appreciate or allow me to poke holes in their firewall to forward 443 and 80 to my server
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    This is one of those interesting major differences between institutions of higher learning that often goes unremarked: some universities (generally the Internet first-adopters) have entire IPv4 subnets and don't firewall machines on their networks. A machine connected to their networks is just publicly accessible by IP address.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zucker42 5y ago
  I think he's saying he can't port forward because he lives on a university campus.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ravi-delia 5y ago
In a similar situation, I run a number of services I use intermittently on my home server. I debated bringing it to college, but decided to leave it at home. I can always SSH in, and should something happen that I need to be present for, I can text my family (though that hasn't happened yet). My main concern is always rebooting after I update, but I keep everything similar between my laptop and my server so I know what might break ahead of time.
- gzer0 5y ago
  Highly suggest looking into setting up Tinypilot if that is the case [1]. It transforms your Raspberry Pi into a browser-based KVM, which then plugs directly into your bare-metal server, giving you a virtual console during BIOS and boot. [1] https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot
benedikt 5y ago
oracle cloud free tier gives you two small instances with public ips it’s not limited to 1 year like aws, they say it will be free forever https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
- smbv 5y ago
  I'll have to check it out. Thanks!
  - jkingsman 5y ago
    "Small" is relative; you've got credits that allow you to have 4 cores and 24GB mem if you don't mind running on ARM.
    - smbv 5y ago
      Honestly, I'm just looking for something I can run Wireguard on to proxy my traffic. It doesn't matter if it's ARM or not, what really matters is the public IP (IPv6 would be super cool) and lots of bandwidth.
      - windex 5y ago
        Hetzner. I have a similar setup for euro 2.5 per month. I dont think they offer it anymore. Now its about 3.50.
        SubparMacro 5y ago
      - xfer 5y ago
        You can buy ip tunnel services like this: https://freerangecloud.com/products.php https://freerangecloud.com/products.php
    - SteveNuts 5y ago
paxys 5y ago
> I guess I also wanna say that I'm sorry Cloudflare. I realize that I'm not the target market. I am literally not giving Cloudflare any money. There is no reason they should support an esoteric and bizarre configuration that I do. This guy is underestimating just how exactly the target market for such a free tier service he is. He is smart, technical, about to go to college, and in a few years will be evaluating what service to use for his startup or big tech job from among a field of competitors.
- danuker 5y ago
  > in a few years If Cloudflare can keep on bleeding money at such scale, in a possibly interest-rate-increasing world, that is. https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2022/Cloudflare-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-and-Fiscal-Year-2021-Financial-Results/default.aspx https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2022/Cloudflare-Ann... In 2021 it had a revenue of $656M, and costs of $917M.
  - wyager 5y ago
    I would like to thank VCs for subsidizing our web hosting!
    - danuker 5y ago
      VCs? It IPO'd, they're stockholders.
      - ______-_-______ 5y ago
        I would like to thank stockholders for subsidizing our VCs!
    - p0nce 5y ago
      Very happy with Cloudflare and honestly if they double their bill I'll just pay double, because it performs admirably imho.
  - xwdv 5y ago
thorncorona 5y ago
You can also setup a reverse proxy using FRP to an e2-micro for free on GCP and run everything there as well
- windex 5y ago
  For the number of times that google has burnt people using their services. It would be a big nope for a lot of people.
- art-vandelay 5y ago
  I'm not sure how viable this would be since their free tier gives you 1GB of egress per month. Any overages are charged at $0.12/GB.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
I think one of the misconceptions is about how cloudflare works. Their networking/routing is based on cheap routing your stuff in the free tier ( eg. Assets). This is done at the cheapest location/datacenter for cloudflare depending on usage/capacity in nearby datacenters. Performance/nearby for paying customers, cheap routing for free tiers. This helps bring usage to their underused datacenters too. If you want to bring your own certificate, you aren't letting cloudflare decide on how to route the files and are using a direct line, circumventing costs reductions they implemented. Because of that, i think they require you to be on the business tier, if you want to use your own certificate. Additionally, this requirement is almost solely for professional clients too. Can someone from cloudflare correct me if I'm wrong? It's just my 2 cents. Note: cheap doesn't mean slow. It mostly means that you won't be routed to a datacenter that is almost at capacity.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  > If you want to bring your own certificate, you aren't letting cloudflare decide on how to route the files and are using a direct line, circumventing costs reductions they implemented. I'm not sure there's any technical reason for this feature being on the paid tier. Domains on the free tier have their own SSL certificates too -- they're just certificates which Cloudflare issued internally, rather than ones provided by the customer.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    Those SSL certificates are issued by cloudflare. The route from cloudflare to the server is without ssl. So i think that makes it possible for cloudflare to cache things on the same domain, but different locations. No? Since i don't think they can cache things when you use your own SSL certificate.
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      > The route from cloudflare to the server is without ssl. That's a user preference, but the most common configuration uses SSL on the back-end (Cloudflare to server) connection. > Since i don't think they can cache things when you use your own SSL certificate. I don't see any reason why that would be the case.
infogulch 5y ago
Is there such a thing as an "email proxy"? I want to store email on a "backend" server not exposed to the internet, and have a separate email server that interfaces with the rest of the internet and both sends outbound email (delivers emails sent from the backend) and receives email (forwards them to the backend), but doesn't store any at all. Like a forward+reverse http proxy, but for email.
- Operyl 5y ago
  There are a number of services that effectively proxy/filter (and act as the primary MX) that then can forward to your MX. But you still need to deal with going outbound, I suppose.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    Yeah that's my point. If you're running your own outbound email server, you might as well run it for inbound as well. I want a "dumb email proxy" so I can forward all email through a stateless $5 VPS with a static IP and not ever need to worry about scaling or securing its storage.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  For email, it's called "relay". Any email server will can do it, it's a very basic email feature. Many services will do it for you (but a few will block it).
  - nulld3v 5y ago
    Exactly this. I run this setup personally: mailserver on my home PC with a relay on my Hetzner dedicated server. The relay proxies all inbound and outbound mail, performs spam filtering but stores no mail. I do this because my home PC's IP changes constantly, and my ISP also blocks port 25. Relays are easy to setup, mailcow-dockerized has built in support.
marcus_cemes 5y ago
> I'm about to graduate from a broke high-schooler to be a broke college student. I could reduce costs and run a minimal VM that acts as a WireGuard VPN server and proxy TCP using fancy firewall rules or whatnot, but that would also cost money. Fellow student here. I love free tiers, but they can also be extremely frustrating. I actually prefer paying for reasonable priced services, that way you know what you're getting. For example I pay 2€/month for a 1vCPU/2GB Hetzner VPS with 20GB of storage, with 20TB of free egress (prices increased recently due to IPv4 shortage, they still charge me only 2€ however). That's about as much as a cup of coffee in CH, I can't recommend Hetzner enough. It could easily handle all traffic without Cloudflare. Having started to get a lot of spam through that domain, I'll take any protection that CF might be giving me. Also, setting up/maintaining Ubuntu from scratch has been extremely beneficial for me. If you're limited by your location, there's nothing wrong with offloading to a VPS or running a reverse proxy. Considering you mentioned port 80/443, I imagine that a NGINX reverse proxy would be sufficient? It's basically your own mini-cloudflare proxy, only you're in control. > I had used Cloudflare briefly before. My issue arose when I realized that they remove your SSL certificate, then use their own. Cloudflare is a big MITM service. Why is this an issue? Any platform that serves requests on your behalf must be able to decrypt the request payload, I think any security expert would argue that having them use their own trusted certificate is much, much better than giving up the private key associated with your own certificate. Trust me, nobody (+/- 0.1%) checks the certificate when visiting your website... If they found a way to just forward on TCP packets, what useful service would they provide? A port-forwarding alternative? It's not so much a man-in-middle attack, you agree to a ToS and they provide a service. Ultimately, the DNS record is the authority on domain ownership, any server that is pointed to by the DNS record is authorised to represent that domain, and is sufficient to request a unique certificate from Let's Encrypt, for example. > But I still don't like you. Why not? I've been using Cloudflare for years, if only for the great DNS management panel. Of the "cloud" companies, they're my favourite. I believe Vercel use their infrastructure (they run their own datacentres), they're great to listen to on podcasts and have some interesting disruptive tech coming out, namely R2, which as a small filmmaker hobbyist, is truely a gamechanger for me. If their interests diverge from mine, I simply terminate my account and reasign the nameservers with my registrar. There's no lock-in.
- 5y ago
arbitrage 5y ago
> Unfortunately, I doubt the tech department at the university would appreciate or allow me to poke holes in their firewall to forward 443 and 80 to my server. I mean, did you ask? Tech people work there, too, and in my experience they love working on this sort of cool stuff. Doesn't hurt to ask.
- prdonahue 5y ago
  Cloudflare employee here. When I graduated from college I left a publicly exposed box (in those days we had a flat, campus-wide /16 with no NAT'ing) server running in the basement of a dorm. I think they finally removed it and the DNS A record a year and a half later :)
  - projektfu 5y ago
    When I worked for a university around 1999-2000, they assigned all computers public IP addresses and would not let me install DHCP to allocate the ones for my group. How things have changed.
bowmessage 5y ago
The little context I can glean from the comments here makes it seem very ironic that the target site is down :)
- smbv 5y ago
  That's not good! It's working for me and I'm running the server... Maybe it's something on your end? I've checked the site on online services, three different networks and two different devices.
  - dageshi 5y ago
    Works for me
  - bowmessage 5y ago
    yep, works fine for me now. I am accessing from a corp IP - might be related to my blip.
hoppla 5y ago
I just want to remind you all that Azure App Proxy is an alternative to a cloudflare tunnel. It however require an enterprise subscription
- 2snakes 5y ago
  6.00 a month - 72.00 per year seems very reasonable.
shireboy 5y ago
Looking at the 3 cited projects, I don't see anything that precludes Github Pages or similar. At first I thought they were dynamic SaaS services and wondered why he'd run those from his dorm. But as best I can tell they're not - they are landing pages and docs for open source projects (cool looking ones, btw.) Slap those up on a static site somewhere for free or really really cheap. Glitch.com might be another option - static websites are always-on and free. If you do really need hosting, 8$/mo for 5 linux containers is a nice option. Personally that seems cheaper in the long run than running a bunch of stuff on your own hardware, network, power. Maybe even add a "buy me a coffee" badge or hit up your mailing lists for help covering hosting costs.
- smbv 5y ago
  I might add a donate button but I doubt anyone will use it. As for static site hosting, I'm not only using static stuff. I have services like FreshRSS that won't run on a static site. > There are many other services I am running (web-based IRC bouncer TheLounge, FreshRSS, and Keycloak, just to name a few) that won't be receptive to be run on Github Pages or whatever.
- mastermojo 5y ago
  +1 for github pages. I've hosted a free static site on github for many years, and have been happy with it.
goodpoint 5y ago
How to corner a market and exploit it: - Provide a free or very cheap service without lock-in antipatterns - Capture a large share of the market - Create lock-in - Extract money by charging fees or doing surveillance or leveraging market power It's amazing how the tech crowd falls for the same tricks decade after decade after decade.
- ziml77 5y ago
  What lock-in are you referring to here?
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    Cloudflare is not at that stage yet, but for a global Internet MiTM there are a hundred different ways to lock user in.
- pixodaros 5y ago
  Likewise, the paid versions of Automattic, SquareSpace and co. are not cheaper than your own site with a small web host! At which point you don't have to worry about random changes of policy and interface at half a dozen services, you have email, file hosting, and a homepage in one simple service. It seems like the OP could SSH or FTP into a server at his parents' house from campus.
brianzelip 5y ago
Awesome to see a pre-university student reading blogs on sourcehut, writing up CTF solutions, self-hosting git tea, and especially, thinking and caring deeply about a decentralized internet! Keep up the great work in Pittsburgh and beyond, we are rooting for you.
pkulak 5y ago
Wow, just last weekend I finally put my pet projects behind Cloudflare (they are hosted at my house). Really the only thing nagging me now is that the port is still technically open, and will respond to anyone who uses it. Yes, the IP is now hidden thanks to Cloudflare, but security through obscurity and all that. I was going to try to whitelist Cloudflare IPs, but that seems like a rather large list that can change at any time. This tunnel thing seems perfect. Is it as simple as running some daemon on my home network and then closing the ports?
- m-app 5y ago
  Seems to be quite stable and well-documented: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/ Edit: but yes, the tunnel ‘thing’ is exactly that! So would be even better.
junon 5y ago
> I'm on the free tier, so let's hope they don't upgrade me and drain my already-drained account If you're in the US, privacy.com. Used it for years, never had an issue. Create a card, use it on whatever, then limit the card to a dollar or something. Or just pause it. Worst case, cloudflare tries to charge you 100$ and emails you when the card declines.
- jrmann100 5y ago
  This, except: if you're graduating high school, there's a chance you don't have a credit history, which might result in getting banned from due to failed identity verification. Source: my own recent experience in registering before/after obtaining a credit score. privacy.com won't confirm if this was the cause.
- smbv 5y ago
  I have tried, but I'm not 18 yet, so I can't use privacy.com or set up donations through Liberapay.
hodgesrm 5y ago
Did this site get the HN hug of death? It does not respond for me.
bargle0 5y ago
You get what you pay for. If you’re getting something for “free”, you’re the one getting paid for.
rr808 5y ago
Cool product I didn't even know about. I'm going to try it out. https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/
fulafel 5y ago
> I doubt the tech department at the university would appreciate or allow me to poke holes in their firewall to forward 443 and 80 to my server Sound very sad if true!
- cschep 5y ago
  No college would ever allow this. Everyone would want their own custom network config? Just doesn't scale and the support would destroy an already grumpy and overextended staff.
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    Tons of colleges just give you a public IP and route all traffic to you.
znpy 5y ago
I could reduce costs and run a minimal VM that acts as a WireGuard VPN server and proxy TCP using fancy firewall rules or whatnot, but that would also cost money. I'm fairly skeptical this person can't afford ~60 $/year for a basic vps from Digitalocean to use as a public endpoint. Or maybe even less if they looked at some non-mainstream vps provider. This whole article was a rant about how I can't get anything good for free. I know right? I always feel the same when I go buying groceries and surprise surprise, I have to pay before leaving. /s On a more serious note... I'd like to tell this person that the fact they are already getting so much free stuff is the reason why they have to be and are so skeptical and cyinical about MITM, security and privacy topics.
- ufmace 5y ago
  This is about what I was thinking, there's a bunch of decent hosting services that will give you a real low-end server for $5/month. Can anybody who is currently going to college in a first-world country not afford that? There's even a few services listed in this thread that can give you a real server for free, perhaps with a little more mucking around.
nadermx 5y ago
Couldn't he ngrok the site?
ur-whale 5y ago
> So how on earth am I planning on keeping my server up during this time? $4 / month cloud VPS running wireguard will do the trick.
JohnTHaller 5y ago
I wonder if someone with (or familiar with) loophole will pop in and explain how to sign up. I didn't see it anywhere on their site either.
- intrepidhero 5y ago
  Poking around (cause the service interests me) it looks like you use their CLI to do everything, including create an account. https://loophole.cloud/docs/commands/account/login https://loophole.cloud/docs/commands/account/login > Loophole service requires authentication, this command allows you to log in or set up one in case you don't yet have it.
  - smbv 5y ago
    Yep, it creates a link with a code, then proceeds to ask me to "sign in on the web" but does not give me an option to sign up. In the Youtube videos, there's a button to "sign up" but not for me. I've tried with multiple browsers on multiple machines on multiple networks.
illamint 5y ago
How about the GitHub Student Developer Pack? https://education.github.com/pack https://education.github.com/pack You get $100 in DigitalOcean credits. That's 20 months of hosting a VPS; plenty of time to figure out how to come up with $5 per month thereafter.
karaterobot 5y ago
The author did not mention what it would cost to get the kind of service he really wanted, without making compromises he felt bad about.
hnarn 5y ago
> I could reduce costs and run a minimal VM that acts as a WireGuard VPN server and proxy TCP using fancy firewall rules or whatnot, but that would also cost money. I don't understand this disqualification. I've been a student, my monthly "income" at that time was probably about $800 before rent, which ate up about half. I don't see how $5 a month for a VPS is something that is unreasonable to assume you could afford, especially if you have a technical interest like this person clearly has.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Havoc 5y ago
Oracle free tier?
candyman 5y ago
I find it disturbing that somehow the whatever the internet is seems to consolidate to central provider because they have such advantages due to scale. Is that how everything goes? Seems weird.
eastdakota 5y ago
> I guess I also wanna say that I'm sorry Cloudflare. I realize that I'm not the target market. I am literally not giving Cloudflare any money. There is no reason they should support an esoteric and bizarre configuration that I do. But what they do, they do pretty well. So, thanks, I guess, for letting me (and probably lots of other people) run their websites and services from a NUC under their dorm's bunk bed. No need to apologize. Happy to have you. Promise, we won't sell your data or do anything sleazy. Too easy to leave us if we did. And good luck in college! PS - When you get a good paying job after college and they ask whether they should use Cloudflare or not, hope you'll tell them how well we treated you. That's how we get most of our multi-million dollar customers.
kyawzazaw 5y ago
Author is brilliant.
kazinator 5y ago
> As most of you don't know, I'm off to college soon (within a couple of months), and I'm planning on taking my server with me. Here is the thing: you can just choose not to do that. Leave it where it is and manage it remotely. Get a web power switch. With that, you can use its web UI to power cycle equipment. I have a web switch that can be programmed to periodically ping equipment and power cycle certain outlets if that fails. One good target for that is your router. Routers sometimes screw up and stop routing; in that case you would have no way to get into the web power switch to manually reset anything. Home is probably the better place for the server. You think you have solved all the problems in advance with Cloudfare and whatnot but you have no idea. The campus network could block needed ports, or otherwise make trouble. Like, oh, accuse you of "hacking" or something. IT people in schools can be dickheads. If you're in shared accommodations (dorm), people may have physical access to the server and tamper with it. Even just accidentally. Plus there is the down-time of moving the server. Transportation risks. If it's working nicely, just leave it. I understand it's a kind of comfort blanket that your server is right there under your desk, but that's just an emotional thing you can let go.

221 points by d4a 5y ago

jgrahamc 5y ago

You are more than welcome to use our free products. That's what they are there for!

njsubedi 5y ago
Whoa! One of the few CTOs that you can randomly run into on the internet, but still I have nothing to ask or tell about their service. Thank you for what you’re doing!
- jgrahamc 5y ago
  You're welcome!
hammyhavoc 5y ago
Are you John Graham-Cumming? If so, hello and thank you for POPfile! Didn't know you worked at CF. :- )
- jgrahamc 5y ago
  I am. And yes, I did create POPFile (https://getpopfile.org/ https://getpopfile.org/). And yes, I do work for Cloudflare, been there a while... https://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/programmer.html https://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/programmer.html
GreenWatermelon 5y ago
HN is just that one unique place where you could run into high profile persons in random threads. Pretty amazing community.
deathanatos 5y ago
Finally, a random HN Cloudflare thread! How am I supposed to reach out to Cloudflare support? If I start at cloudflare.com, and click "Support", "Contact Support", that takes me to the Cloudflare Dashboard. In the upper corner, there is "Help Center" and "Cloudflare Community". In the bottom, "Contact support". "Contact support" and "Help Center" both lead to the same page: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us ; that page has a giant "Submit a request" button on it. Clicking that takes me … back to the dashboard. I suppose there is the community, but the UI seems to imply there is a "file ticket" thing, but the UI seems broken. Also, your RDAP implementation — is the API (not just the web UI) to it something people are free to use? Additionally, it's not quite RDAP; it doesn't conform to the RDAP RFC (RFC 9083) in the eventAction string used for expiration dates. (It calls the eventAction "Expiration Date"; the RFC calls it "expiration". Parsers are picky.)
- jgrahamc 5y ago
  Are you logged into your account?
  - deathanatos 5y ago
    Yes.
- stavros 5y ago
  Seems like a UI bug, yeah. After you get back to the dashboard, if you click "support" again, you go to a different page, where you can actually contact support. For me, it ended up on this URL: https://dash.cloudflare.com/<myzoneid>/support https://dash.cloudflare.com/<myzoneid>/support Basically, append /support to your dashboard URL.
infocollector 5y ago
Curious: How does Cloudflare pay for the email routing network bandwidth + hosting charges it incurs for its free services? I ask because it seems Google ran this for a decade and then found out that it is time to charge for it.
- jgrahamc 5y ago
  We have a lot of bandwidth for our CDN and DDoS services.
- eastdakota 5y ago
  This is the most common misconception about our business. Bandwidth, when you're small. But the scale economics in bandwidth are unlike almost anything else. As you get more and more bandwidth, the cost per bit drops until, in most places, it will go to zero. If you know those dynamics are present in a market, you can forward price knowing that you'll get to those scale advantages. Today, servicing a new free customer is virtually costless to us. So, to this college-bound customer and others, welcome.

mmastrac 5y ago

CloudFlare works so well for so many use cases it's hard to justify not using it. I previously used it to get to my internal home network using the standard product and IP range whitelists (plus some additional secrets). I currently have it running on top of some ancient legacy appengine apps to clean up domains/URLs, add a caching layer and keep my costs at basically zero overall (workers doing a little bit of work as well). I'm tempted to ditch Google's legacy free workspace product using the email forwarding as well. It's like Twilio: there just isn't anyone near from a competitor perspective. As long as they keep improving, they are so far ahead it's their game to lose. And just to clarify: I do everything on the free tier.

jgrahamc 5y ago
I'm tempted to ditch Google's legacy free workspace product using the email forwarding as well. Go on then: https://blog.cloudflare.com/migrating-to-cloudflare-email-routing/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/migrating-to-cloudflare-email-ro...
- readams 5y ago
  Any solution for sending email? Just forwarding mail is not remotely the same thing; there's a million ways to do that.
  - ttul 5y ago
    Stay tuned. MailChannels will be announcing a free email sending option for Cloudflare Workers customers shortly. I will post it up on HN.
    - ttul 5y ago
      https://community.cloudflare.com/t/send-email-from-workers-using-mailchannels-for-free/361973 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/send-email-from-workers-u...
  - jgrahamc 5y ago
    Not at the moment.

AdamH12113 5y ago

>Unfortunately, I doubt the tech department at the university would appreciate or allow me to poke holes in their firewall to forward 443 and 80 to my server. So how on earth am I planning on keeping my server up during this time? When I was in college (2000-2006) you could fill out a form to request to run a server. I'm not sure how common that is today, but it's at least worth asking about.

icedchai 5y ago
Back in the mid 90's, everyone on my college residential network had static, public IPs, no firewalls or filtering. Different times.
- nisegami 5y ago
  This was still essentially the case at my university ~3 years ago (and likely still is). There was a firewall by default, but it was a simple form to fill out to have it disabled.
- vehemenz 5y ago
  True in the early 00's as well.
  - nomel 5y ago
    Usually resulting in a Windows computer being powned before patches could even be applied: https://it.slashdot.org/story/04/08/17/1347214/survival-time-for-unpatched-systems-cut-by-half https://it.slashdot.org/story/04/08/17/1347214/survival-time... Note: The graph url is dead.
    - vehemenz 5y ago
      Yes, I remember this well. I put an unpatched Windows 2000 machine on the network, and the system logs were littered with intrusion attempts—more than 500—after being online for a few minutes.
- 5y ago

javajosh 5y ago

One of the hosting providers should just give this kid a $5/mo VPS in perpetuity. Call it a marketing spend. His heart is totally in the right place - I really respect the thought he's put into his options, and contemplating the downsides of modern day options. The threat model he's worried about is quite real, and I don't think we really know how bad things can get when so much data is accumulated in one place. That said, I hope he doesn't give up the search for an alternative method, even if it's stashing a box in a hidden part of the library.

merlinscholz 5y ago
There already are tons of options for free VMs. I have 4 Oracle Cloud instances with 4 cores, 24gb RAM and 200gb disks total for this exact same use case. I suppose the author prematurely assumed all VPSs are costly or does not want to set up the networking themself.
- javajosh 5y ago
  I did a google search for "free tier vps" and sure enough, it does seem like the standard is roughly $300 in credit (AWS seems to do it differently). Which is enough for a small vps-like-thing for 5 years, or 4 large instances for a few weeks.
  - gzer0 5y ago
    The credit for AWS expires after 1 year. Azure credits expire in 90 days. GCP expire after 30. Whether all used or unused.
    - lostmsu 5y ago
      At least Oracle and GCP have always free instances, that never expire.
  - agwa 5y ago
    GCP's $300 credit is in addition to letting you run one free e2-micro instance indefinitely: https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier/ https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier/ "Free Tier: All Google Cloud customers can use select Google Cloud products—like Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery—free of charge, within specified monthly usage limits. When you stay within the Free Tier limits, these resources are not charged against your Free Trial credits or to your Cloud Billing account's payment method after your trial ends."

familymart 5y ago

intrepidhero 5y ago

I'm curious why the requirement was to not port forward? Seems like the author values the independence of self hosted stuff and port forwarding is a pretty common solution.

ravi-delia 5y ago
The server will be on campus internet, so they can't forward anything.
- intrepidhero 5y ago
  Right. Thanks. I was distracted by a coworker and should have read more carefully.
yunohn 5y ago
2nd line of post: > Unfortunately, I doubt the tech department at the university would appreciate or allow me to poke holes in their firewall to forward 443 and 80 to my server
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  This is one of those interesting major differences between institutions of higher learning that often goes unremarked: some universities (generally the Internet first-adopters) have entire IPv4 subnets and don't firewall machines on their networks. A machine connected to their networks is just publicly accessible by IP address.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zucker42 5y ago
I think he's saying he can't port forward because he lives on a university campus.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ravi-delia 5y ago

In a similar situation, I run a number of services I use intermittently on my home server. I debated bringing it to college, but decided to leave it at home. I can always SSH in, and should something happen that I need to be present for, I can text my family (though that hasn't happened yet). My main concern is always rebooting after I update, but I keep everything similar between my laptop and my server so I know what might break ahead of time.

gzer0 5y ago
Highly suggest looking into setting up Tinypilot if that is the case [1]. It transforms your Raspberry Pi into a browser-based KVM, which then plugs directly into your bare-metal server, giving you a virtual console during BIOS and boot. [1] https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot

benedikt 5y ago

oracle cloud free tier gives you two small instances with public ips it’s not limited to 1 year like aws, they say it will be free forever https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

smbv 5y ago
I'll have to check it out. Thanks!
- jkingsman 5y ago
  "Small" is relative; you've got credits that allow you to have 4 cores and 24GB mem if you don't mind running on ARM.
  - smbv 5y ago
    Honestly, I'm just looking for something I can run Wireguard on to proxy my traffic. It doesn't matter if it's ARM or not, what really matters is the public IP (IPv6 would be super cool) and lots of bandwidth.
    - windex 5y ago
      Hetzner. I have a similar setup for euro 2.5 per month. I dont think they offer it anymore. Now its about 3.50.
      - SubparMacro 5y ago
    - xfer 5y ago
      You can buy ip tunnel services like this: https://freerangecloud.com/products.php https://freerangecloud.com/products.php
  - SteveNuts 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

> I guess I also wanna say that I'm sorry Cloudflare. I realize that I'm not the target market. I am literally not giving Cloudflare any money. There is no reason they should support an esoteric and bizarre configuration that I do. This guy is underestimating just how exactly the target market for such a free tier service he is. He is smart, technical, about to go to college, and in a few years will be evaluating what service to use for his startup or big tech job from among a field of competitors.

danuker 5y ago
> in a few years If Cloudflare can keep on bleeding money at such scale, in a possibly interest-rate-increasing world, that is. https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2022/Cloudflare-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-and-Fiscal-Year-2021-Financial-Results/default.aspx https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2022/Cloudflare-Ann... In 2021 it had a revenue of $656M, and costs of $917M.
- wyager 5y ago
  I would like to thank VCs for subsidizing our web hosting!
  - danuker 5y ago
    VCs? It IPO'd, they're stockholders.
    - ______-_-______ 5y ago
      I would like to thank stockholders for subsidizing our VCs!
  - p0nce 5y ago
    Very happy with Cloudflare and honestly if they double their bill I'll just pay double, because it performs admirably imho.
- xwdv 5y ago

thorncorona 5y ago

You can also setup a reverse proxy using FRP to an e2-micro for free on GCP and run everything there as well

windex 5y ago
For the number of times that google has burnt people using their services. It would be a big nope for a lot of people.
art-vandelay 5y ago
I'm not sure how viable this would be since their free tier gives you 1GB of egress per month. Any overages are charged at $0.12/GB.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

I think one of the misconceptions is about how cloudflare works. Their networking/routing is based on cheap routing your stuff in the free tier ( eg. Assets). This is done at the cheapest location/datacenter for cloudflare depending on usage/capacity in nearby datacenters. Performance/nearby for paying customers, cheap routing for free tiers. This helps bring usage to their underused datacenters too. If you want to bring your own certificate, you aren't letting cloudflare decide on how to route the files and are using a direct line, circumventing costs reductions they implemented. Because of that, i think they require you to be on the business tier, if you want to use your own certificate. Additionally, this requirement is almost solely for professional clients too. Can someone from cloudflare correct me if I'm wrong? It's just my 2 cents. Note: cheap doesn't mean slow. It mostly means that you won't be routed to a datacenter that is almost at capacity.

duskwuff 5y ago
> If you want to bring your own certificate, you aren't letting cloudflare decide on how to route the files and are using a direct line, circumventing costs reductions they implemented. I'm not sure there's any technical reason for this feature being on the paid tier. Domains on the free tier have their own SSL certificates too -- they're just certificates which Cloudflare issued internally, rather than ones provided by the customer.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  Those SSL certificates are issued by cloudflare. The route from cloudflare to the server is without ssl. So i think that makes it possible for cloudflare to cache things on the same domain, but different locations. No? Since i don't think they can cache things when you use your own SSL certificate.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    > The route from cloudflare to the server is without ssl. That's a user preference, but the most common configuration uses SSL on the back-end (Cloudflare to server) connection. > Since i don't think they can cache things when you use your own SSL certificate. I don't see any reason why that would be the case.

infogulch 5y ago

Is there such a thing as an "email proxy"? I want to store email on a "backend" server not exposed to the internet, and have a separate email server that interfaces with the rest of the internet and both sends outbound email (delivers emails sent from the backend) and receives email (forwards them to the backend), but doesn't store any at all. Like a forward+reverse http proxy, but for email.

Operyl 5y ago
There are a number of services that effectively proxy/filter (and act as the primary MX) that then can forward to your MX. But you still need to deal with going outbound, I suppose.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Yeah that's my point. If you're running your own outbound email server, you might as well run it for inbound as well. I want a "dumb email proxy" so I can forward all email through a stateless $5 VPS with a static IP and not ever need to worry about scaling or securing its storage.
marcosdumay 5y ago
For email, it's called "relay". Any email server will can do it, it's a very basic email feature. Many services will do it for you (but a few will block it).
- nulld3v 5y ago
  Exactly this. I run this setup personally: mailserver on my home PC with a relay on my Hetzner dedicated server. The relay proxies all inbound and outbound mail, performs spam filtering but stores no mail. I do this because my home PC's IP changes constantly, and my ISP also blocks port 25. Relays are easy to setup, mailcow-dockerized has built in support.

marcus_cemes 5y ago

> I'm about to graduate from a broke high-schooler to be a broke college student. I could reduce costs and run a minimal VM that acts as a WireGuard VPN server and proxy TCP using fancy firewall rules or whatnot, but that would also cost money. Fellow student here. I love free tiers, but they can also be extremely frustrating. I actually prefer paying for reasonable priced services, that way you know what you're getting. For example I pay 2€/month for a 1vCPU/2GB Hetzner VPS with 20GB of storage, with 20TB of free egress (prices increased recently due to IPv4 shortage, they still charge me only 2€ however). That's about as much as a cup of coffee in CH, I can't recommend Hetzner enough. It could easily handle all traffic without Cloudflare. Having started to get a lot of spam through that domain, I'll take any protection that CF might be giving me. Also, setting up/maintaining Ubuntu from scratch has been extremely beneficial for me. If you're limited by your location, there's nothing wrong with offloading to a VPS or running a reverse proxy. Considering you mentioned port 80/443, I imagine that a NGINX reverse proxy would be sufficient? It's basically your own mini-cloudflare proxy, only you're in control. > I had used Cloudflare briefly before. My issue arose when I realized that they remove your SSL certificate, then use their own. Cloudflare is a big MITM service. Why is this an issue? Any platform that serves requests on your behalf must be able to decrypt the request payload, I think any security expert would argue that having them use their own trusted certificate is much, much better than giving up the private key associated with your own certificate. Trust me, nobody (+/- 0.1%) checks the certificate when visiting your website... If they found a way to just forward on TCP packets, what useful service would they provide? A port-forwarding alternative? It's not so much a man-in-middle attack, you agree to a ToS and they provide a service. Ultimately, the DNS record is the authority on domain ownership, any server that is pointed to by the DNS record is authorised to represent that domain, and is sufficient to request a unique certificate from Let's Encrypt, for example. > But I still don't like you. Why not? I've been using Cloudflare for years, if only for the great DNS management panel. Of the "cloud" companies, they're my favourite. I believe Vercel use their infrastructure (they run their own datacentres), they're great to listen to on podcasts and have some interesting disruptive tech coming out, namely R2, which as a small filmmaker hobbyist, is truely a gamechanger for me. If their interests diverge from mine, I simply terminate my account and reasign the nameservers with my registrar. There's no lock-in.

5y ago

arbitrage 5y ago

> Unfortunately, I doubt the tech department at the university would appreciate or allow me to poke holes in their firewall to forward 443 and 80 to my server. I mean, did you ask? Tech people work there, too, and in my experience they love working on this sort of cool stuff. Doesn't hurt to ask.

prdonahue 5y ago
Cloudflare employee here. When I graduated from college I left a publicly exposed box (in those days we had a flat, campus-wide /16 with no NAT'ing) server running in the basement of a dorm. I think they finally removed it and the DNS A record a year and a half later :)
- projektfu 5y ago
  When I worked for a university around 1999-2000, they assigned all computers public IP addresses and would not let me install DHCP to allocate the ones for my group. How things have changed.

bowmessage 5y ago

The little context I can glean from the comments here makes it seem very ironic that the target site is down :)

smbv 5y ago
That's not good! It's working for me and I'm running the server... Maybe it's something on your end? I've checked the site on online services, three different networks and two different devices.
- dageshi 5y ago
  Works for me
- bowmessage 5y ago
  yep, works fine for me now. I am accessing from a corp IP - might be related to my blip.

hoppla 5y ago

I just want to remind you all that Azure App Proxy is an alternative to a cloudflare tunnel. It however require an enterprise subscription

2snakes 5y ago
6.00 a month - 72.00 per year seems very reasonable.

shireboy 5y ago

Looking at the 3 cited projects, I don't see anything that precludes Github Pages or similar. At first I thought they were dynamic SaaS services and wondered why he'd run those from his dorm. But as best I can tell they're not - they are landing pages and docs for open source projects (cool looking ones, btw.) Slap those up on a static site somewhere for free or really really cheap. Glitch.com might be another option - static websites are always-on and free. If you do really need hosting, 8$/mo for 5 linux containers is a nice option. Personally that seems cheaper in the long run than running a bunch of stuff on your own hardware, network, power. Maybe even add a "buy me a coffee" badge or hit up your mailing lists for help covering hosting costs.

smbv 5y ago
I might add a donate button but I doubt anyone will use it. As for static site hosting, I'm not only using static stuff. I have services like FreshRSS that won't run on a static site. > There are many other services I am running (web-based IRC bouncer TheLounge, FreshRSS, and Keycloak, just to name a few) that won't be receptive to be run on Github Pages or whatever.
mastermojo 5y ago
+1 for github pages. I've hosted a free static site on github for many years, and have been happy with it.

goodpoint 5y ago

How to corner a market and exploit it: - Provide a free or very cheap service without lock-in antipatterns - Capture a large share of the market - Create lock-in - Extract money by charging fees or doing surveillance or leveraging market power It's amazing how the tech crowd falls for the same tricks decade after decade after decade.

ziml77 5y ago
What lock-in are you referring to here?
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Cloudflare is not at that stage yet, but for a global Internet MiTM there are a hundred different ways to lock user in.
pixodaros 5y ago
Likewise, the paid versions of Automattic, SquareSpace and co. are not cheaper than your own site with a small web host! At which point you don't have to worry about random changes of policy and interface at half a dozen services, you have email, file hosting, and a homepage in one simple service. It seems like the OP could SSH or FTP into a server at his parents' house from campus.

brianzelip 5y ago

Awesome to see a pre-university student reading blogs on sourcehut, writing up CTF solutions, self-hosting git tea, and especially, thinking and caring deeply about a decentralized internet! Keep up the great work in Pittsburgh and beyond, we are rooting for you.

pkulak 5y ago

Wow, just last weekend I finally put my pet projects behind Cloudflare (they are hosted at my house). Really the only thing nagging me now is that the port is still technically open, and will respond to anyone who uses it. Yes, the IP is now hidden thanks to Cloudflare, but security through obscurity and all that. I was going to try to whitelist Cloudflare IPs, but that seems like a rather large list that can change at any time. This tunnel thing seems perfect. Is it as simple as running some daemon on my home network and then closing the ports?

m-app 5y ago
Seems to be quite stable and well-documented: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/ Edit: but yes, the tunnel ‘thing’ is exactly that! So would be even better.

junon 5y ago

> I'm on the free tier, so let's hope they don't upgrade me and drain my already-drained account If you're in the US, privacy.com. Used it for years, never had an issue. Create a card, use it on whatever, then limit the card to a dollar or something. Or just pause it. Worst case, cloudflare tries to charge you 100$ and emails you when the card declines.

jrmann100 5y ago
This, except: if you're graduating high school, there's a chance you don't have a credit history, which might result in getting banned from due to failed identity verification. Source: my own recent experience in registering before/after obtaining a credit score. privacy.com won't confirm if this was the cause.
smbv 5y ago
I have tried, but I'm not 18 yet, so I can't use privacy.com or set up donations through Liberapay.

hodgesrm 5y ago

Did this site get the HN hug of death? It does not respond for me.

bargle0 5y ago

You get what you pay for. If you’re getting something for “free”, you’re the one getting paid for.

rr808 5y ago

Cool product I didn't even know about. I'm going to try it out. https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/

fulafel 5y ago

> I doubt the tech department at the university would appreciate or allow me to poke holes in their firewall to forward 443 and 80 to my server Sound very sad if true!

cschep 5y ago
No college would ever allow this. Everyone would want their own custom network config? Just doesn't scale and the support would destroy an already grumpy and overextended staff.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  Tons of colleges just give you a public IP and route all traffic to you.

znpy 5y ago

I could reduce costs and run a minimal VM that acts as a WireGuard VPN server and proxy TCP using fancy firewall rules or whatnot, but that would also cost money. I'm fairly skeptical this person can't afford ~60 $/year for a basic vps from Digitalocean to use as a public endpoint. Or maybe even less if they looked at some non-mainstream vps provider. This whole article was a rant about how I can't get anything good for free. I know right? I always feel the same when I go buying groceries and surprise surprise, I have to pay before leaving. /s On a more serious note... I'd like to tell this person that the fact they are already getting so much free stuff is the reason why they have to be and are so skeptical and cyinical about MITM, security and privacy topics.

ufmace 5y ago
This is about what I was thinking, there's a bunch of decent hosting services that will give you a real low-end server for $5/month. Can anybody who is currently going to college in a first-world country not afford that? There's even a few services listed in this thread that can give you a real server for free, perhaps with a little more mucking around.

nadermx 5y ago

Couldn't he ngrok the site?

ur-whale 5y ago

> So how on earth am I planning on keeping my server up during this time? $4 / month cloud VPS running wireguard will do the trick.

JohnTHaller 5y ago

I wonder if someone with (or familiar with) loophole will pop in and explain how to sign up. I didn't see it anywhere on their site either.

intrepidhero 5y ago
Poking around (cause the service interests me) it looks like you use their CLI to do everything, including create an account. https://loophole.cloud/docs/commands/account/login https://loophole.cloud/docs/commands/account/login > Loophole service requires authentication, this command allows you to log in or set up one in case you don't yet have it.
- smbv 5y ago
  Yep, it creates a link with a code, then proceeds to ask me to "sign in on the web" but does not give me an option to sign up. In the Youtube videos, there's a button to "sign up" but not for me. I've tried with multiple browsers on multiple machines on multiple networks.

illamint 5y ago

How about the GitHub Student Developer Pack? https://education.github.com/pack https://education.github.com/pack You get $100 in DigitalOcean credits. That's 20 months of hosting a VPS; plenty of time to figure out how to come up with $5 per month thereafter.

karaterobot 5y ago

The author did not mention what it would cost to get the kind of service he really wanted, without making compromises he felt bad about.

hnarn 5y ago

> I could reduce costs and run a minimal VM that acts as a WireGuard VPN server and proxy TCP using fancy firewall rules or whatnot, but that would also cost money. I don't understand this disqualification. I've been a student, my monthly "income" at that time was probably about $800 before rent, which ate up about half. I don't see how $5 a month for a VPS is something that is unreasonable to assume you could afford, especially if you have a technical interest like this person clearly has.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Havoc 5y ago

Oracle free tier?

candyman 5y ago

I find it disturbing that somehow the whatever the internet is seems to consolidate to central provider because they have such advantages due to scale. Is that how everything goes? Seems weird.

eastdakota 5y ago

> I guess I also wanna say that I'm sorry Cloudflare. I realize that I'm not the target market. I am literally not giving Cloudflare any money. There is no reason they should support an esoteric and bizarre configuration that I do. But what they do, they do pretty well. So, thanks, I guess, for letting me (and probably lots of other people) run their websites and services from a NUC under their dorm's bunk bed. No need to apologize. Happy to have you. Promise, we won't sell your data or do anything sleazy. Too easy to leave us if we did. And good luck in college! PS - When you get a good paying job after college and they ask whether they should use Cloudflare or not, hope you'll tell them how well we treated you. That's how we get most of our multi-million dollar customers.

kyawzazaw 5y ago

Author is brilliant.

kazinator 5y ago

> As most of you don't know, I'm off to college soon (within a couple of months), and I'm planning on taking my server with me. Here is the thing: you can just choose not to do that. Leave it where it is and manage it remotely. Get a web power switch. With that, you can use its web UI to power cycle equipment. I have a web switch that can be programmed to periodically ping equipment and power cycle certain outlets if that fails. One good target for that is your router. Routers sometimes screw up and stop routing; in that case you would have no way to get into the web power switch to manually reset anything. Home is probably the better place for the server. You think you have solved all the problems in advance with Cloudfare and whatnot but you have no idea. The campus network could block needed ports, or otherwise make trouble. Like, oh, accuse you of "hacking" or something. IT people in schools can be dickheads. If you're in shared accommodations (dorm), people may have physical access to the server and tamper with it. Even just accidentally. Plus there is the down-time of moving the server. Transportation risks. If it's working nicely, just leave it. I understand it's a kind of comfort blanket that your server is right there under your desk, but that's just an emotional thing you can let go.