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I counter with the fact that hosting something means nothing unless connections can be made. Well, unless hosting in itself is your end goal. Even here on HN,
by Dalewyn 3y ago
I counter with the fact that hosting something means nothing unless connections can be made. Well, unless hosting in itself is your end goal.
Even here on HN, there are plenty of comments about how someone can't connect to a website because it uses Cloudflare and Cloudflare decided to block them due to a dirty IP address, shady (read: hyper privacy focused) user agent, CAPTCHAs that don't work (see prior factor), or other factors.
Some form of DDOS protection is desired in this day and age, and Cloudflare provides a very convenient service to answer it. Unfortunately, this means the vast majority of the internet is routed through Cloudflare making it a singular point of failure/denial. Aka centralization.
- reactordev 3y agoYes but it was the hosters choice to leverage cloudflare as a cache/cdn instead of other methods (that probably would have succumbed to the HN hug of death).
- scubbo 3y agoEh, fair - I think we have differing definitions of centralization, though I can see that yours is actually more accurate. I was using it not to mean "a lot of traffic goes through this thing", but rather "it would be difficult for users of this service to migrate away from it if they wanted to", which I guess is more like "lock-in-iness". The SPOF property you describe is indeed undesirable and important to be aware of!