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I am somehow out of the loop about why Cloudflare is as big as it is? There are many other CDNs, why them?
by vvpan 1y ago
I am somehow out of the loop about why Cloudflare is as big as it is? There are many other CDNs, why them?
- wbl 1y agoCloudflare is very easy for small sites to use. The enterprise market is where the competition is.
- speedgoose 1y agoDescent free tier, not restricted to enterprise customers, many features, good overall quality.
- SXX 1y agoFree tier that let you hide your server IPs, cheap domain registry (with no margin) and even some also tunnels for zero trust. Like I used them for a lot of personal and tbh even commercial projects for years paying them $0. Also they have bandidth alliance with Backblaze so you can serve 100s of TBs for free. So there a lot of convinience and free stuff. It's quite obviously that when I had commercial customers where for whatever reason free tier wasn't anough I juse used them as well. Why not? There are horror stories about their corporate pricing, but for smaller company paying $20-200 for CDN is no brainer. Also huge massive advantage of CloudFlare is that majority of their services are not metered so it's hard to wake up to $100,000 bill like it can happen with AWS and almost any other CDN provider. I still believe this kind of centralized MiTM is bad for us all, but honestly I'd rather it be CloudFlare than Amazon, Microsoft or some other "evil corp".
- vvpan 1y agoThanks for the thorough write-up. I am also conflicted that somebody has so much power in the market but at least they are not AWS/GCP.