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How did we get to a place where either Cloudflare or AWS having an outage means a large part of the web going down? This centralization is very worrying.

• ekianjo 11mo ago
  because cloudfare protection blah blah, until cloudfare is down itself and then you are back to "who watches the watchmen"
  • k12sosse 11mo ago
    That's easy, the watchmen watchmen watch the watchmen.
• ec109685 11mo ago
  Totally cooked if you have Cloudflare fronting us-east-1, with no redundancies.
  • tacker2000 11mo ago
    The mother of all bad infra decisions.
  • a012 11mo ago
    They have multi cloud infra, between us-east-1 and Azure
  • lbreakjai 11mo ago
    It could be worse. You could have a backup on Azure.
• cj 11mo ago
  Except businesses love it. A lot (and I mean a lot) of people in IT like centralization specifically because it’s hard to blame people for doing something that everyone else is doing.
  • iso1631 11mo ago
    And HN users love it too. I've had people on this site say how great it is that their system routes 30% of traffic on the internet. I'd be horrified. That's not the internet or computing industries I grew up with, or started working in. But as long as the SPY keeps hitting > 10% returns each year, everyone's happy.
  • chb 11mo ago
    "No one gets fired for buying IBM!"
    • deathhand 11mo ago
      "No one gets fired for buying Microsoft" "No one gets fired for buying AWS" "No one gets fired for buying Cloudflare" Perhaps the most graceful death of a tech company is that sentiment? Before some perception shift?
• lforster 11mo ago
  They're using cloudfare for multicloud, but still have cloudfare as a single point of failure. Should make a cloudfare for cloudfare to solve this.
  • MichaelZuo 11mo ago
    If there’s clearly a single point of failure shouldn’t it be called a single cloud pretending to be “multicloud”?
  • nexttk 11mo ago
    Like the infamous "smiling through the pain" meme: "I added a load-balancer to improve system reliability" (happy) "Load balancer crashed" (smiling-through-the-pain)
    • PunchyHamster 11mo ago
      Reliability have very weird curve frankly. Technically, multi-node cluster with failover (or full on active-active) will have far higher uptime than just a single node. Practically, to get the multi-node cluster (for any non trivial workload) to work right, reliably, fail-over in every case etc. is far more work, far more code (that can have more bugs), and even if you do everything right and test what you can, unexpected stuff can still kill it. Like recently we had uncorrectable memory error which just happened to hit the ceph daemon just right that one of the OSDs misbehaved and bogged down entire cluster...
  • kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago
    Failover to Akamai.
    • cortesoft 11mo ago
      As someone who has worked for a CDN for over a decade, this is what most big customers do. Under normal circumstances, they send portions of traffic to different CDNs, usually based on cost (and or performance in various regions). When an issue happens, they will pull traffic from the problem CDN. Of course, if a big incident happens for a big CDN, there might not be enough latent capacity in the other CDNs to take all the traffic. CDNs are a cutthroat business, with small margins, so there usually isn’t a TON of unused capacity laying around.
• joeiq 11mo ago
  Is avoiding single point of failure in anyone’s playbook? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • whstl 11mo ago
    We only care about it when it's time to complain about the work of individual people. Companies can always do as they please and people will rationalize anything.
• seydor 11mo ago
  Slowly and with full conscience of where we were heading to.
• majani 11mo ago
  Now that network effects and data lock-in have taken root, downtime is not as big of a concern as it was in the 2000s
  • swyx 11mo ago
    except, yknow, where peoples lives and livelihoods depend on access to information/being able to do things on exact time. aws and cloudflare are disqualifying themselves from hospitals and military and whatnot.
    • kordlessagain 11mo ago
      For example, Cloudflare employees make money on promises to mitigate such attacks, but then can’t guarantee they will, and take all their customers down at once. It’s a shared pain model.
  • amw-zero 11mo ago
    What does this even mean? Because people have locked in their data, they’re ok with downtime? I can’t imagine a world where this is true.
    • wahnfrieden 11mo ago
      It's just that customers are more understanding when they see their Netflix not working either otherwise they just think you're less professional. Try talking to customers after an outage and you will see.
    • Ambolia 11mo ago
      It costs a lot of money to move, you don't know if the alternative will be any better, and if it affects a lot of companies then it's nobody's fault. "Nobody ever got fired for buying Cloudflare/AWS" as they say.
    • serf 11mo ago
      it's not just that, it's the creation of a sorta status symbol, or at least of symbol of normality. there was a point (maybe still) where not having a netflix subscription was seen as 'strange'. if that's the case in your social circles -- and these kind of social things bother you -- you're not going to cancel the subscription due to bad service until it becomes a socially accepted norm.
• bikamonki 11mo ago
  Compliance. If you wanna sell your SAAS to big corpo, their compliance teams will feel you know what you're doing if they read AWS or Cloudflare on your architecture, even if you do not quite know what you're doing.
• ulrikrasmussen 11mo ago
  Yeah, I went to HN after the third web page didn't work. I am not just worried about the single point of failure, I am much more worried about this centralization eventually shaping the future standards of the web and making it de facto impossible to self-host anything. Well that and the fact that when 99% goes through a central party, then that central party will be very interesting for authoritarian governments to apply sweeping censorship rules to.
  • popcorncowboy 11mo ago
    > eventually shaping the future standards of the web and making it de facto impossible to self-host anything Eventually?
  • sankalpmukim 11mo ago
    It is already nearly impossible/very expensive in my country to be able to get a public IP address (Even IPv6) which you could host on. World is heavily moving towards centrally dependant on these big Cloud providers.
    • ghshephard 11mo ago
      What part of the world has any ipv6 limitations? In the USA An ISP will give you a /48 from their /32 if you have any colo arrangement without even a blink. That gives you 2^16 networks with essentially infinite number of hosts on each network. Zero additional charge.
• bilekas 11mo ago
  This topic is raised every time there is an outage with cloudflare and the truth of the matter is, they offer an incredible service, there is not a bit enough competition to deal with it. By definition their services are so good BECAUSE their adoption rate is so high. It's very frustrating of course, and it's the nature of the beast.
  • blazinglyfast 11mo ago
    False dichotomy. Both can be true.
    • bilekas 11mo ago
      > False dichotomy. Not sure I follow, I didn't say it wasn't worrying or an issue. Just the reasons for it getting to this point are valid.
• fithisux 11mo ago
  Hacking software or hardware is so old school. The target these days is the user. The make-believe worm.
• afavour 11mo ago
  Because no one cares enough, including users. Oddly this centralization allows a complete deferral of blame without you even doing anything: if you’re down, that’s bad. But if you’re down, Spotify is down, social media is down… then “the internet is broken” and you don’t look so bad. It also reduces your incentive to change, if “the internet is down” people will put down their device and do something else. Even if your web site is up they’ll assume it isn’t. I’m not saying this is a good thing but I’m simply being realistic about why we ended up where we are.
  • alentred 11mo ago
    There is an upside too. Us humans, we also need our down time occasionally.
    • 867-5309 11mo ago
      globally coordinated
    • eastburnn 11mo ago
      Businesses and peoples’ livelihoods are online nowadays, it’s not just scrolling Twitter for fun. The internet can’t afford to just “give people mental health breaks.”
      • drunkpotato 11mo ago
        Actually, yes, it can. Chill a bit.
      • zamadatix 11mo ago
        The vast majority of the internet can afford that though, and not the entire thing needs to operate the same way.
      • KronisLV 11mo ago
        > Businesses and peoples’ livelihoods are online nowadays What happened to having a business continuity plan? E.g. when your IT system is down, writing down incoming orders manually and filling them into the system when it's restored? I have a creeping suspicion that people don't care about that, in which case they can't really expect more than to occasionally be forced into some downtime by factors outside of their control. Either it's important enough to have contingencies in place, or it's not. Downtime will happen either way, no matter how brilliant the engineers working at these large orgs are. It's just that with so much centralization (probably too much) the blast range of any one outage will be really large.
• nntwozz 11mo ago
  Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
• burnt-resistor 11mo ago
  A key risk of monopolies is that they lead to monoculture SPoFs.
• pixel_popping 11mo ago
  Mostly since the AWS craze started a decade ago, developers have gone away from Dedicated servers (which are actually cheaper, go figure), which is causing all this mess. It's genuinely insane that many companies are designing a great amount of fallbacks... on the software level but almost none is thought on the hardware/infrastructure level, common-sense dictate that you should never host everything on a single provider.
  • geerlingguy 11mo ago
    I tried as hard as I could to stay self hosted (and my backend is, still), but getting constant DDoS attacks and not having the time to deal with fighting them 2-3x a month was what ultimately forced me to Cloudflare. It's still worse than before even with their layers of protection, and now I get to watch my site be down a while, with no ability to switch DNS to point back to my own proxy layer, since CF is down :/
    • VladVladikoff 11mo ago
      This is wild. Was your website somehow controversial? Ive been running many different websites for over 30+ years now, and have never been the target of a DDOS. The closest I’ve seen was when one website had a blind time based sql injection vulnerability and the attacker was abusing it, all the SLEEP() injected into the database brought the server to a crawl. But that’s just one attacker from a handful of IPs, hardly what i would call a DDOS.
      • pclmulqdq 11mo ago
        I think people sometimes mistake legitimate traffic spikes for DDOS attacks. My blog has the former, but no site I have ever hosted has seen the latter.
      • geerlingguy 11mo ago
        I made the mistake of telling people it was hosted on a Pi cluster in a YouTube video a couple years ago, and asked nobody to try DDoSing it. I was a bit more naive thinking the YouTube viewer community was more like HN where people may joke about it, but nobody would actually do it. I was wrong, and ever since I've dealt with a targeted attack (which was evolving as I added more CF firewall rules). At this point it's taken care of, but only because I have most things completely blocked at the CF firewall layer.
• martinald 11mo ago
  Many reasons but DDoS protection has massive network effects. The more customers you have (and therefore bandwidth provision) the easier it is to hold up against a DDoS, as DDoS are targeting just one (usually) customer. So there are massive economies of scale. Small CDN with (say) 10,000 customers and 10mbit/sec per customer can handle 100gbit/s DDoS (way too simplistic, but hopefully you get the idea) - way too small. If you have the same traffic provisioned on average per customer and have 1 million customers, you can handle a DDoS 100x the size. Only way to compete with this is to massively overprovision bandwidth per customer (which is expensive, as those customers won't pay more just for you to have more redundancy because you are smaller). In a way (like many things in infrastructure) CDNs are natural monopolies. The bigger you get -> the more bandwidth and PoP you can have -> more attractive to more customers (this repeats over and over). It was probably very astute of Cloudflare to realise that offering such a generous free plan was a key step in this.
  • codedokode 11mo ago
    In my opinion, DDoS is possible only because there is no network protocol for a host to control traffic filtering on upstream providers (deny traffic from certain subnets or countries). In this case everybody would prefer write their own systems rather than rely on a harmful monopoly.
    • powerpixel 11mo ago
      > here is no network protocol for a host to control traffic filtering on upstream providers (deny traffic from certain subnets or countries). There is no network protocol per se, but there is commercial solutions like fortinet that can block countries iirc, but to note that it's only ip range based so it's not worth a lot
      • wbl 11mo ago
        Unless you filter at the far end of the bottleneck you still go offline.
      • jabart 11mo ago
• hhthrowaway1230 11mo ago
  Don't think there is anything wrong with a centralised service being down, you just make a conscious decision if you want that and can afford that? People not being ready for cloudflare/[insert hyperscaler] to be possibly down is the only fault.
• sotix 11mo ago
  This might sound crazy as a software engineer, but I actually like the occasional "snow day" where everything goes down. It's healthy for us to all disconnect from the internet for a bit. The centralization unintentionally helps facilitate that. At least, that's my glass half full perspective.
  • gspencley 11mo ago
    I can understand that sentiment. Just don't lose sight of the impact it can have on every day people. My wife and I own a small theatre and we sell tickets through Eventbrite. It's not my full time job but it is hers. Eventbrite sent out an email this morning letting us know that they are impacted by the outage. Our event page appears to be working but I do wonder if it's impacting ticket sales for this weekend's shows. So while us in tech might like a "snow day", there are millions of small businesses and people trying to go about their day to day lives who get cut off because of someone else's fuck-ups when this happens.
    • telepromptereye 11mo ago
      Absolutely solid point; there are a couple of apps I use daily for productivity, chores, even for alarm scheduling, that with the free versions, the ads wouldn’t load so I couldn’t use them but some of them were updated already. Made me realize I forgot that we’re kind of like cyborgs relying on technology that’s integrated so deeply into our lives that all it takes is an EMP blast like a monopolistic service going down to bring -us- down until we take a breath and learn how to walk again. Wild time.
  • hashim 11mo ago
    I'm guessing you're employed and your salary is guaranteed regardless. Would you have the same outlook if you were the self-employed founder of an online business and every minute of outage was costing you money?
    • nondrool 11mo ago
      What are you paying in order to be down? Even if you were making a million a minute, typically, it still didn't cost you a thing, nor have you lost anything. You're not making as much, sure, but neither a cost, nor a loss.
• rcarmo 11mo ago
  What is worrying is that distributed systems don’t seem to be that distributed in practice.
  • expedition32 11mo ago
    Designed to survive a first strike from the USSR. Taken down by Cloudflare.
    • kazen44 11mo ago
      oh mind you, the actual routing architecture of the internet was. Cloudflare being down mainly just affects layer 7...
• strict9 11mo ago
  And all of these outages happening not long after most of them dismissed a large amount of experienced staff while moving jobs offshore to save in labor costs.
• Lammy 11mo ago
  It's because single points of traffic concentration are the most surveillable architecture, so FVEY et al economically reward with one hand those companies who would build the architecture they want to surveil with the other hand.
• drob518 11mo ago
  IMO, centralization is inevitable because the fundamental forces drive things in that direction. Clouds are useful for a variety of reasons (technical, time to market, economic), so developers want to use them. But clouds are expensive to build and operate, so there are only a few organizations with the budget and competency to do it well. So, as the market matures you end up with 3 to 5 major cloud operators per region, with another handful of smaller specialists. And that’s just the way it works. Fighting against that is to completely swim upstream with every market force in opposition.
• mobiuscog 11mo ago
  How did we get to a place where Cloudflare being down means we see an outage page, but on that page it tells us explicitly that the host we're trying to connect to is up, and it's just a Cloudflare problem. If it can tell us that the host is up, surely it can just bypass itself to route traffic.
  • ralferoo 11mo ago
    "... surely it can just ..." Congratulations, you've successfully completed Management Training 101.
• baq 11mo ago
  because efficiency trumps redundancy in the short term, which is all that matters in a super competitive environment.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• kordlessagain 11mo ago
  The technical term for it is a man in the middle. It’s better to call it what it is that way you aren’t fooled into thinking it’s not, because it is.
• an-allen 11mo ago
  Well the centralisation without rapid recovery and practices that provide substantial resiliency… that would be worrying. But I dare say the folks at these organisations take these matters incredibly seriously and the centralisation problem is largely one of risk efficiency. I think there is no excuse, however, to not have multi region on state, and pilot light architectures just in case.
• kilpikaarna 11mo ago
  Currently at the public library and I can't use the customer inventory terminals to search for books. They're just a web browser interface to the public facing website, and it's hosted behind CF. Bananas.
• gmiller123456 11mo ago
  Don't forget the CloudStrike outage: One company had a bug that brought down almost everything. Who would have thought there are so many single points of failure across the entire Internet.
• TacticalCoder 11mo ago
  [dead]
• bsoles 11mo ago
  > How did we get to a place where either Cloudflare or AWS having an outage means a large part of the web going down? As always, in the name of "security". When are we going to learn that anything done, either by the government or by a corporation, in the name of security is always bad for the average person?
• alkonaut 11mo ago
  Because it's better to have a really convenient and cheap service that works 99% of the time, than a resilient that is more expensive or more cumbersome to use. It's like github vs whatever else you can do with git that is truly decentralized. The centralization has such massive benefits that I'm very happy to pay the price of "when it's down I can't work".
• ljm 11mo ago
  I would be less worried if Cloudflare and AWS weren't involved in many more things than simply running DNS. AWS - someone touches DynamoDB and it kills the DNS. Cloudflare - someone touches functionality completely unrelated to DNS hosting and proxying and, naturally, it kills the DNS. There is this critical infrastructure that just becomes one small part of a wider product offering, worked on by many hands, and this critical infrastructure gets taken down by what is essentially a side-effect. It's a strong argument to move to providers that just do one thing and do it well.
• rglover 11mo ago
  Most developers don't care to know how the underlying infrastructure works (or why) and so they take whatever the public consensus is re: infra as a statement of fact (for the better part of the last 15 years or so that was "just use the cloud"). A shocking amount of technical decisions are socially, not technically enforced.
• mvkel 11mo ago
  This was always the case. There was always a "us-east" in some capacity, under Equinix, etc. Except it used to be the only "zone," which is why the internet is still so brittle despite having multiple zones. People need to build out support for different zones. Old habits die hard, I guess.
• telepromptereye 11mo ago
  We take the idea of the internet always being on for granted. Most people don’t understand the stack and assume that when sites go down it’s isolated, and although I agree with you, it’s just as much complacency and lack of oversight and enforcement delays in bureaucracy as it is centralization. But I guess that’s kind of the umbrella to those things… lol
• moralestapia 11mo ago
  5 mins. of thought to figure out why these services exist? Dialogue about mitigations/solutions? Alternative services? High availability strategies? Nah! It's free to complain. Me personally, I'd say those companies do a phenomenal job by being a de facto backbone of the modern web. Also Cloudflare, in particular, gives me a lot of things for free.
• kaonwarb 11mo ago
  I recommend this Ben Thompson piece on why resiliency has declined: https://stratechery.com/2025/resiliency-and-scale/ https://stratechery.com/2025/resiliency-and-scale/
• exasperaited 11mo ago
  Re: Cloudflare it is because developers actively pushed "just use Cloudflare" again and again and again. It has been dead to me since the SSL cache vulnerability thing and the arrogance with which senior people expected others to solve their problems. But consider how many people still do stupid things like use the default CDN offered by some third party library, or use google fonts directly; people are lazy and don't care.
• abtinf 11mo ago
  Because they are great services, are generally pretty easy to get started with, and usually work as expected, which has led to broad adoption.
• BurningFrog 11mo ago
  How many more of these until governments step in and take over "critical infrastructure"?
• GuB-42 11mo ago
  Another one that worries me is Let's Encrypt. It is not as bad as Cloudflare or AWS because certificates will not expire the instant there is an outage, but considers that: - It serves about 2/3 of all websites - TLS is becoming more and more critical over time. If certificates fail, the web may as well be down - Certificate lifetimes are becoming shorter and shorter, now 90 days, but Let's Encrypt is now considering 6 days, with 47 days being planned as a minimum - An outage is one thing, but should a compromise happen, that would be even more catastrophic Let's Encrypt is a good guy now, but remember that Google used to be a good guy in the 2000s too!
  • seniorThrowaway 11mo ago
    Agree, I’ve thought about this one too. The history of SSL/TLS certs is pretty hacky anyway in my opinion. The main problem they are solving really should have been solved at the network layer with ubiquitous IPsec and key distribution via DNS since most users just blindly trust whatever root CAs ship with their browser or OS, and the ecosystem has been full of implementation and operational issues. Let’s Encrypt is great at making the existing system less painful, and there are a few alternatives like ZeroSSL, but all of this automation is basically a pile of workarounds on top of a fundamentally inappropriate design.
    • rtkwe 11mo ago
      There's not really a way around the initial trust problem with consumer oriented certs though. Yours could reduce the number of initially trusted down to one I think but not any further.
    • kazen44 11mo ago
      its a shame DANE never took off. If we actually got around to running a trusted DNSSEC based DNS system and allowed clients to create certificates thanks to DANE, we would be in a far more resilient setup compared to what we are now. But DNSSEC was hard according to some, and now we are running a massive SPOF in terms of TLS certificates.
      • 11mo ago
• phendrenad2 11mo ago
  Because DDoS is a fact of life (and even if you aren't targeted by DDoS, the bot traffic probing you to see if you can be made part of the botnet is enough to take down a cheap $5 VPS). So we have to ask - why? Personally, I don't accept the hand-wavy explanation that botnets are "just a bunch of hacked IoT devices". No, your smart lightbulb isn't taking down Reddit. I slightly believe the secondary explanation that it's a bunch of hacked home routers. We know that home routers are full of things like suspicious oopsie definitely-not-government backdoors.
• kahrl 11mo ago
  When there is an accident on the interstate we should blame the centralization of traffic and advocate for no more highways. Very worrying indeed.
• bawolff 11mo ago
  The same reason we have centralization across the economy. Economies of scale is how you make a big business succesful, and once you are on top its hard to dislodge you.
• cyanydeez 11mo ago
  CAPITALISM Are people really this confused?
• peacebeard 11mo ago
  A lot of products use AWS because "we could build redundancy and multi-region if we need it" and then never build it.
  • rtkwe 11mo ago
    I think some of the issues in the last outage actually affected multiple regions. IIRC internally some critical infrastructure for AWS depends on us-east-1 or at least it failed in a way that didn't allow failover.
• giantrobot 11mo ago
  People use CloudFlare because it's a "free" way for most sites to not get exploited (WAF) or DDoSed (CDN/proxy) regularly. A DDoS can cost quite a bit more than a day of downtime, even just a thundering herd of legitimate users can explode an egress bill. It sucks there's not more competition in this space but CloudFlare isn't widely used for no reason. AWS also solves real problems people have. Maintaining infrastructure is expensive as is hardware service and maintenance. Redundancy is even harder and more expensive. You can run a fairly inexpensive and performant system on AWS for years for the cost of a single co-located server.
• 0xbadcafebee 11mo ago
  It's not really. People are just very bad at putting the things around them into perspective. Your power is provided by a power utility company. They usually serve an entire state, if not more than one (there are smaller ones too). That's "centralization" in that it's one company, and if they "go down", so do a lot of businesses. But actually it's not "centralized", in that 1) there are actually many different companies across the country/world, and 2) each company "decentralizes" most of its infrastructure to prevent massive outages. And yes, power utilities have outages. But usually they are limited in scope and short-lived. They're so limited that most people don't notice when they happen, unless it's a giant weather system. Then if it's a (rare) large enough impact, people will say "we need to reform the power grid!". But later when they've calmed down, they realize that would be difficult to do without making things worse, and this event isn't common. Large internet service providers like AWS, Cloudflare, etc, are basically internet utilities. Yes they are large, like power utilities. Yes they have outages, like power utilities. But the fact that a lot of the country uses them, isn't any worse than a lot of the country using a particular power company. And unlike the power companies, we're not really that dependent on internet service providers. You can't really change your power company; you can change an internet service provider. Power didn't used to be as reliable as it is. Everything we have is incredibly new and modern. And as time has passed, we have learned how to deal with failures. Safety and reliability has increased throughout critical industries as we have learned to adapt to failures. But that doesn't mean there won't be failures, or that we can avoid them all. We also have the freedom to architect our technology to work around outages. All the outages you have heard about recently could be worked around, if the people who built on them had tried: - CDN goes down? Most people don't absolutely need a CDN. Point your DNS at your origins until the CDN comes back. (And obviously, your DNS provider shouldn't be the same as your CDN...) - The control plane goes down on dynamic cloud APIs? Enable a "limp mode" that persists existing infrastructure to serve your core needs. You should be able to service most (if not all) of your business needs without constantly calling a control plane. - An AZ or region goes down? Use your disaster recovery plan: deploy infrastructure-as-code into another region or AZ. Destroy it when the az/region comes back. ...and all of that just to avoid a few hours of downtime per year? It's likely cheaper to just take the downtime. But that doesn't stop people from piling on when things go wrong, questioning whether the existence of a utility is a good idea.
• neop1x 11mo ago
  It's not only centralization in the sense your website will be down if they are down but it is also a centralized MITM proxy. If you transfer sensitive data like chats over cloudflare-"protected" endpoints, you also allow CF to transparently read and analyze it in plain-text. It must be very easy for state agencies to spy on the internet nowadays, they woukd just ask CF to redirect traffic to them.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• thenthenthen 11mo ago
  …sneaks in Azure
• paulddraper 11mo ago
  Because bots are a real thing. And it’s hard to protect against DDoS without something like Cloudflare. Look at the posts here. Even the meager HN “hug of death” will take things down
• butlike 11mo ago
  It's weird to think about so bear with me. I don't mean this sardonically or misanthropically. But, it's "just the internet." It's just the internet. It dones't REALLY matter in a large enough macro view. It's JUST the internet.
• ronald_petty 11mo ago
  Consider joining the Internet Society. An entire group of people who care!
• chasing0entropy 11mo ago
  Agreed. More worrying is that it appears standard practice or separation between domain and nameserver administration has been lost to one-stop-shop marketing.
• ridgeguy 11mo ago
  Short-term economic forces, probably. Centralization is often cheaper in the near term. The cost of designing in single-point failure modes gets paid later.
• gist 11mo ago
  There is this tendency to phrase questions (or statements) as "when did 'we' ". These decision are made individually not centrally. There is no process in place (and most likely there will never be) that will be able to control and dictate if people decide one way of doing things is the best way to do it. Even assuming they understand everything or know of the pitfalls. Even if you can control individually what you do for the site you operate (or are involved in) you won't have any control on parts of your site (or business) that you rely on where others use AWS or Cloudflare.
• poemxo 11mo ago
  For most services it's safer to host from behind Cloudflare, and Cloudflare is considered more highly available than a single IaaS or PaaS, at least in my headcanon.
• glitchc 11mo ago
  All decentralized systems tend to centralization over time.