> When did everyone decide they needed Cloudflare for everything? When distributed denial-of-service attacks through botnets, sold as a service to anyone by th

> When did everyone decide they needed Cloudflare for everything? When distributed denial-of-service attacks through botnets, sold as a service to anyone by the "owners" of these botnets, became popular. It takes just one person who doesn't like you, or even who wants to take your site down "for the lulz", to cause so much traffic that your site is disabled and removed by your hosting provider as a way to "protect" their other clients. By being widely spread over the global Internet, CDNs like cloudflare have the advantage that each node receives only a small portion of a widely distributed denial-of-service attack, instead of receiving all of it at a single place as would happen without a CDN.