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Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

387 points by adulion 19d ago

Havoc 19d ago
Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there
- CommanderData 19d ago
  They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up. I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.
  - ramon156 19d ago
    big corps = big money. they dont make money from your $5/mth static site, its practically free when you're at CF scale
    - CommanderData 19d ago
      What I was talking about: https://newtrackon.com/ https://newtrackon.com/ 10+ BT trackers using CF likely free tier. Low-end EACH 300-500 MILLION HTTP requests/24hr uncached, some exceed a billion reqs/day (using statistics from other open trackers) 20TB-40TB daily, ~1-3 Gbps sustained. That's a crap load of transfer and compute to process those tiny network connections. As someone that's run a Tunnel on a normal site in the millions, the daemon uses a sizeable amount of CPU and I can't see any reason why it's not the same on the other end. Whatever source CF has going on, kudos to them and their engineering team.
      - viraptor 19d ago
        Lots of people will run http over the tunnel rather than https, so that actually comes out cheaper for CF overall because they don't have to start new TLS sessions.
  - tmtvl 18d ago
    If you're not paying, you're not the customer; you're the product.
  - pocksuppet 17d ago
    You don't pay with money, you pay with the curses^H^H^H^H^H MITM.
- tao_oat 19d ago
  They're fine for a CDN but overall their offering surprisingly immature IME. The devx for their hosted scripts/database just isn't there, and e.g. they only allow one global API key with full permissions, etc.
  - Havoc 18d ago
    Yeah noticed the key thing too - that seems quite dangerous for things like DNS challenge
- jarym 19d ago
  Like bunny.net - its still tiny compared to CF but hopefully they will grow and won't adopt the crappier bits of CF.
- jarco 19d ago
  I tried them with our small company. They seem ... young. Support on discord is not something I can sell to our owners. We sent a ticket that activating some of their services instantly caused bad bots to scan our site, and never got a decent reply on that. Their attitude does not inspire confidence and for that reason we scrapped them as an option. Never actually found a good European option besides them, which is sad.
  - kosinus 19d ago
    Like, the bad bots you see when they get an https cert issued and it becomes visible in the public logs, or something else? Agree discord sucks.
  - viraptor 19d ago
    > We sent a ticket that activating some of their services instantly caused bad bots to scan our site You assigned a new https certificate around that time, didn't you? Those are public now and will cause an immediate scan.
  - bcye 19d ago
    There is a normal support ticket system not on Discord, which they loudly advertise for having a very good response time. The Discord server is not the primary support method
    - AndroTux 19d ago
      In my case, the claim was justified. Got a technical response answering my question in detail after half an hour or so.
      - boesboes 19d ago
        That's also my experience. I did have a few instances of 'random requests failing' they couldn't really diagnose back when they were new; but that was just amazon dropping request in the end Service has been great, prices like 10% of cloudflare too once you get the real pricing :P
- frevib 19d ago
  We use them en they have improved a lot in the last year. For edge services they have all the important thing like ddos protection and edge scripting. There is no replacement for Cloudflare Tunnel, but frp [1] is a good alternative. We don’t miss Cloudflare one bit. [1] https://github.com/fatedier/frp https://github.com/fatedier/frp
- s_dev 19d ago
  https://eualternative.eu/categories/cdn/ https://eualternative.eu/categories/cdn/
  - sparkling 19d ago
    Bunny is the MVP among these European alternatives. It's not just a CDN, it offers Cloudflare-style Edge scripting, Edge workers, databases (Sqlite compatible) etc.
    - s_dev 19d ago
      MVP would be widely understood on this forum to mean "Minimum Viable Product", I don't think that's what you meant. Options are always good to have.
      - boesboes 19d ago
        true, but MVP -> most valuable player might be even more common on the internet, interesting conundrum tbh haha
- bakugo 19d ago
  Something to consider if you're looking at Bunny.net: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710845
  - breakingcups 18d ago
    I wonder of the CEO ever got back with an update. It seems awfully quiet in that thread.
maxcoding 19d ago
I feel like your site needs a CDN, it takes over 40 seconds to load your front page from the EU.
- dotcoma 19d ago
  Maybe a European CDN, like Bunny (Slovenia)
  - unglaublich 19d ago
    Do they also have their own infra or are they just an entity between the customer and AWS?
    - ramon156 19d ago
      They have their own infra but its not the size of CF. Chicken and Egg
noir_lord 19d ago
Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue.com/blog/european-cdn-concentration-cloudflare-nine-in-ten https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue... Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months. Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier. Personally I think we absolutely should, I just don't think we will. Barring them doing something so egregiously awful we don't have the choice, Governments can move fast when they want to but efficient government scares the shit out of me because it rarely happens outside of a genuinely serious crisis.
- embedding-shape 19d ago
  > Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier. I'm thinking the opposite might be the way to go here. We already know that "retaliation" comes from the US government regardless if you did something or not, so most of us (Europeans) have stopped pretending there is a way of preventing it. Even more, if we piss off Trump enough, he might be dumb enough to try to block European access to CloudFlare, or something similar and maybe even dumber. So with this, maybe the goal should actually be to try to piss off Trump and the US administration as much as possible, in order for them to start reacting and cutting off some stuff, so we (again, Europeans) basically gets forced off CloudFlare et al. Lots of companies already finished moving away from storing their primary data in the US, lots of companies is in process of doing so (albeit some look like they'll take forever) but also lots of companies still aren't prepared for the future, would be nice if US government could make the decision a bit easier for them to make :)
  - microtonal 19d ago
    While I theoretically agree, the issue is that Trump will connect economical issues to blowing up NATO Article 5, leaving NATO completely, or retracting intelligence or Starlink for Ukraine. So for the most part, the EU has to work slowly and under the radar. That said, my worry is that we'll be back to business as usual if the midterms look favorable. Even the urgency present during January's Greenland threats was gone after a few months. I fear that we don't have the long-term focus and planning to make sovereignty really happen. But I'd love to be surprised.
bildung 19d ago
I'd also be interested in share of companies using a CDN in the first place. UK has 17k sites, while France and Germany, so countries with about equal and higher population than the UK, have only 4k and 6k sites behind a CDN. I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?
- wiether 19d ago
  Their index being paywalled, it's not possible to answer about its content. I wanted to check if the 5 customers for which I already did a change on their Cloudflare settings today where on the list, but can't do.
- embedding-shape 19d ago
  > I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany? Maybe our countries are just small enough to not be overwhelmed by traffic? Most websites I've built and launched for Spanish national companies, that only have other Spaniards as users and customers, haven't needed any CDN at all, because you don't suddenly get 1K req/s. Meanwhile, launch a global website in English, that even get the slightest amount of popular, and all of a sudden you reach 1K req/s very quickly. Add on top that people usually don't even give two cents about performance, and adding CDN on top as a saving grace seems like an easy tradeoff. So, why add a CDN when you don't need it? :) Probably 80% of everything I've ever deployed never needed a CDN in the first place, but I also save it as a thing in my toolbox to be used sparingly, rather than a default thing I slap on top of everything.
  - ivlad 19d ago
    nginx can do about 20krps per CPU for static files. You only need CDN if you want to improve time to DOM loaded in locations where time to first byte is over ~100ms and can be improved with local caching. If all your users are in Spain and you don’t care how fast your site loads for a techbro in California, you indeed don’t need CDN.
cbg0 19d ago
> The front door is not the whole stack Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN? On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to help keep you online and now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business.
- dwroberts 19d ago
  [flagged]
  - cbg0 19d ago
    I was explaining why I believe it's a super popular service. I have no affiliation or stock, just a regular user.
  - microtonal 19d ago
    I think they articulated the underlying issue well. Cloudflare is too attractive for individuals and small businesses. For instance, my personal website has a healthy amount of traffic, but means nothing at CDN scale. I considered moving to a EU CDN company, but they all have per GB/TB pricing. It would cost me nothing now, but what if my site comes under attack or someone starts hotlinking a large file? So, I stay with Cloudflare because with their free plan I don't have to worry about such contingincies. I would even be happy to pay for it, but for individuals and small business the 'black swan' events that could bankrupt them will keep them from switching to a pay-as-you-go service.
  - glimshe 19d ago
    My PM buddies speak like this about any subject.
- embedding-shape 19d ago
  > now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires CDN and that somehow $200/month is a small amount of money for a small business.
vaylian 19d ago
Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?
- embedding-shape 19d ago
  Depends on your use case. If you have a very inefficient backend (maybe legacy project?), you have massive amount of traffic (say 100K req/s or above) or you really must have sub-500ms latency absolutely everywhere in the world, then it might make sense to slap a CDN (or similar) on top of that. In pretty much any case outside of that, it makes no sense to waste the time, money or effort on CDNs. But, all the CDN companies seemingly have convinced half the internet that you absolutely must use a CDN, otherwise you'll get hacked/broke/killed/sent to the moon, and they've been successful with this campaign too seemingly.
  - esseph 19d ago
    Data scraping. If anything else, the AI machine wants near constant streams of new data, even if it already checked with you 30ms ago. A CDN helps immensely. Also keeps you from getting DDoS'd if you did something like run it off your home connection.
    - embedding-shape 19d ago
      Your webserver most likely have "rate limiting" built in already, which you can configure to act based on lots of variables typically. Set a limit of 1 req/s or whatever, and you've stopped 99% of all DDoS you'll encounter on the public web. If your visitors get cranky, up it to 10 req/s and you still are preventing most of the "abusive traffic", granted your backend/website isn't completely upside down when it comes to performance and resource usage. CDN is something you do once you run out of options, not something you should reach for immediately, it makes no sense in most cases of just hosting a website.
      - deleted 18d ago
        [deleted]
chrocni380 19d ago
[flagged]
- Steve16384 19d ago
  How did you extrapolate that leap of logic? Maybe we suck at business.
  - ilikerashers 19d ago
    We have stagnant economies with slow adopters and shallow capital markets. EU tech companies are working with hands tied behind their backs. The US deserves it's success.
schnebbau 19d ago
Yeah because it's priced well and it works. It's a no-brainer. (Also if it does go down, well so has everyone else so no big deal) Also in this list of GOATed companies: Tailscale, Ubiquiti.
deleted 19d ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 19d ago
The problem is that we have spent 40 years adopting US technology, across multiple generations of software developers and decision makers, while everyone was supposedly on the same side. It will take similar amount of years to go back into the cold war heterogeneous computing landscape of the 60, early 90s. This assuming there would be an willingness across all European countries to actually push for that, and not jump out when it gets too hard and search for compromises instead. This is why most sovereignty initiatives focus mostly on SaaS products and hardly on actual computing devices.
- sajithdilshan 19d ago
  Even if EU countries want to push for their own solutions, the biggest problem is the capital. The governments cannot fund this with tax payers money because they have other critical problems to solve and private companies only go far if they can make a profit. Only time will tell how far this sovereign movement would go. Maybe when the US would have a president/government from the Democratic Party someday in the future. EU would cozy up again to US and go back to how things were. There’s no permanent enemies or allies when it comes to politics and at the end of the day it all revolves around money
  - pessimizer 18d ago
    > The governments cannot fund this with tax payers money because they have other critical problems to solve The governments can's solve this problem because the entire economic model of the EU is that the core exploits the periphery, who don't have a currency that they can weaken as a response. If they had a strong democratic central government and a real central bank in the EU, they'd be forced to make transfer payments to the weaker members, and to bail them out (losing the leverage to make elite demands on them.) The EU as a whole could easily solve the problem, they have the population, the talent, and the infrastructure. They're just really docile from the CIA and their own elite cliques working on them for the better part of a century. > Only time will tell how far this sovereign movement would go. There is none. Blah blah blah in the media isn't a "sovereign movement." It's a campaign to get you to vote for the same middle of the road radical centrist neocons served on a substrate of normie-relaxing anti-Trump rhetoric.
em500 19d ago
Tale as old as time (or at least as the 1970s): nobody ever got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Cloudfare / AWS / Azure. 9 out of 10 corporate decisions are for blame avoidance / ass covering.
- chpatrick 19d ago
  It's actually a great service though.
  - viraptor 19d ago
    It's also a great protection racket. They host many DDoS provider sites and protect them from law enforcement.
    - viraptor 19d ago
      Someone's eager to downvote this, but it's been known for a long time and still happens in obvious ways. First page of results for booter services contains https://zeusstress.com/ https://zeusstress.com/ which is hosted by Cloudflare (yes yes, ceo will send lawyers to say they only proxy not host - doesn't matter in practice)
- edelbitter 19d ago
  .. 9 out of 10 unhappy customers are currently unable to cause any blame, because they cannot even reach customer service because they are getting the "bot" treatment.
- Danoch 19d ago
  [dead]
amelius 19d ago
But isn't a CDN a commodity? I.e., you can switch to a different one with almost no effort.
- pyvpx 19d ago
  How does that quip go again…there are only two difficulties in computer science, cache invalidation, naming things, and counting. Going from one CDN to another can be infuriating even at a surprisingly small scale. Mostly (imo) from caching semantics and counting.
  - amelius 19d ago
    Can you give a practical example?
- kypro 19d ago
  It's not really a commodity when Cloudflare is often cheaper, simpler and provides a better service compared to it's competitors. For it to be a commodity there would be no good reason to pick Cloudflare over any alternative and this absolutely isn't the case.
- AndroTux 19d ago
  Depends how deeply integrated it is. Cloudflare offers a web application firewall that can quickly become complex, alongside features like custom routing rules, input parsing, custom headers, etc. As soon as you start integrating any of those into your environment, migration becomes more difficult fast.
tunahanfaruksav 19d ago
[flagged]
dakolli 19d ago
In the late 90s and early 2000s the NSA and other US intelligence agencies underwent massive efforts to basically privatize the gathering of intelligence. Its a lot easier to fund your "total information awarness" initiatives via public markets and private investors than to ask congress for money to do so. So they did just that. "In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contacted Unspam Technologies, asking, "Do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is?" The DHS' email served as the impetus for Cloudflare, a technology company Prince co-founded with Holloway and fellow Harvard Business School graduate Michelle Zatlyn the following year." --Matthew Prince's Wikipedia page. Dont for a second think cloudflare's generous free tier offerings are out of the goodness of their heart. They're a giant fkin MiTM project for the US governemnt. And of course, cloudflare isn't the only one.
tolusky 19d ago
[flagged]
- cassianoleal 19d ago
  Do you mean US national security?
Yash16 19d ago
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iamislida 19d ago
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jillesvangurp 19d ago
It's seriously good value for small websites. Basically, there is no cost aside from the domain. And for registering and managing domains, they are pretty much the most affordable option as well. And they have a few other things that aren't half bad to use with pretty generous freemium layers. We used Google's CDN for the last six years or so but it's pretty annoying to deal with and you have to pay for a load balancer every month in order to properly use it. That adds up to quite a bit per year. Even if all you are doing is routing domains to some bucket with a website. We migrated most of our gcloud stuff to Hetzner beginning of the year. That left a load balancer and a few static websites hosted in Google buckets. I migrated all of that to Cloudflare just a few months ago. I still have a few buckets in gcloud proxied via a vm in hetzner with a proxied domain in Cloudflare. Not the most elegant route but it works. I might optimize some of that later. At this point, we pay for some Google buckets and not much else in gcloud. Honestly, Google and AWS need to start paying attention to Cloudflare more. Their complexity is chasing people towards Cloudflare. The hoops you have to jump through with both of them to host a simple website with their CDNs is embarrassing. I've gone through the process with both of them. Although my experience with Route53 is a bit stale at this point. On Cloudflare, getting an new website up and running with a freshly registered domain takes only a few minutes.
- pocksuppet 19d ago
  The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers. Cloudflare is the LG TV of websites, but it's worse because we've known it has an always-on microphone and speech-to-text for over a decade and we still keep using it for some reason.
  - CommanderData 19d ago
    Is there any evidence of this
    - bcye 19d ago
      Well it is known SSL termination servers are a popular target: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-nsa-taps-google-yahoo-data-center-links/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...
tonyhart7 19d ago
so instead of developing actual competent solution, European complaining about why US tech dominate ????? what stopping europe from using their home ground solution ??? nothing this is just a skill issue take
throw93947309 19d ago
[flagged]
- bdauvergne 19d ago
  Is it satire ? Laws apply to the publisher not to the TLS endpoint.
- AndroTux 19d ago
  This has to be rage bait, right? Ever heard of GDPR? How about ICE?
  - throw93947309 18d ago
    ICE does not have a jurisdiction in europe.
    - AndroTux 18d ago
      Exactly.
shevy-java 19d ago
The EU needs to stop giving money to the USA in general. They contribute to their own demise by doing so. Canadians understand this so much better than the EU, so the only logical conclusion to be made is that the EU is currently controlled by US lobbyists. This would explain about 80% of the issues; the remaining issues are inertia within the EU, but it also isn't made any easier when the US government constantly favours US mega-corporations ruthlessly infiltrating and abusing other markets.
VBprogrammer 19d ago
Cloudflare interstitial pages are becoming the new cookie / GDPR pop-up for me. Remember when the internet used to be good?
- viraptor 19d ago
  Unfortunately that one's on the operators. I can complain for days about CF, but nobody is forcing the companies to default to giving everyone a managed challenge page. Some do, because either they don't care or don't realise the extra cost.
- cassianoleal 19d ago
  Same but they're so much worse than cookie banners...
dansmet 19d ago
[dead]
ObscureScience 19d ago
My employer uses CDN77. Only for serving static resources.
- simondotau 19d ago
  But do they offer even 10% of the features Cloudflare offers to free customers? To imply that Cloudflare is merely a fancy CDN is to miss the whole point.
  - Tepix 19d ago
    It's the same issue as being cloud agnostic. If you use their unique features, you're locking yourself in. Is it worth it?
    - simondotau 18d ago
      I get it. I’ve consciously avoided that exact trap with AWS. But Cloudflare aren’t giving me “features” so much as they’re allowing my site, which is routinely DDOSed, the ability to remain online at all.
jamesnorden 19d ago
You have to ask why they're so "generous" with giving away free services.
- bell-cot 19d ago
  Looking back over the past 3-ish decades, becoming utterly dominant in some part of "essential" stuff on the internet has a way of paying off big. Or, they discuss their free stuff at length here - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000147733326000016/cloud-20251231.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000147733326.... (That is Cloudflare's 10-K for calendar 2025 - scrutinized by serious investors, and with heavy penalties for lying.)
raverbashing 19d ago
It's hard to beat the "free DDoS" protection of CF. Could even be considered dumping in a way
CrimsonRain 19d ago
[flagged]
- DuncanCoffee 19d ago
  4edgy5me
- bean469 19d ago
  > This article is as useful as writing sky is blue. Subtle
parasxos 19d ago
In control systems, one vendor behind nine out of ten front doors has a name: common-mode failure. We get audited for it. The web apparently calls it best practice.
Zaheer 19d ago
Has anyone used Cloudflare's enterprise bot packages and have first hand experience with AWS's equivalent offering? Would love to chat.
postepowanieadm 19d ago
Company samples are tiny.
arjie 19d ago
Cloudflare is a great service and nearly free on low traffic sites. This describes a surprising amount of competence among European webmasters of small sites.
- nonethewiser 18d ago
  Yeah this is basically my reaction. 9/10 use it because it's obviously the best solution. The real point is what's between the lines: A growing number of European techies are not optimizing for the best technical solution. At least on hackernews. The observed stat says otherwise, up to this point in time at least. Personally I love using cloudflare. I am always surprised to see the hate from devs here. I would expect it to be beloved.
miu33 19d ago
[dead]
nottorp 19d ago
Cloudflare is the only CDN with a free tier that's basically enough for personal use and even a small organization, right?
reincoder 19d ago
I was looking into the IPv6 adoption of US government websites (https://community.ipinfo.io/t/the-state-of-ipv6-across-us-government-federal-state-county-and-beyond/7352 https://community.ipinfo.io/t/the-state-of-ipv6-across-us-go...) when we discovered that Cloudflare had essentially dethroned Akamai for government content hosting over a number of years. The post primarily focuses on IPv6, but according to our data, Cloudflare hosts 70% of US government websites.
- deleted 19d ago
  [deleted]
thih9 19d ago
What are some EU based alternatives? Edit: I found https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare , which lists among others: https://bunny.net/ https://bunny.net/ , https://www.keycdn.com/ https://www.keycdn.com/ , https://blazingcdn.com/ https://blazingcdn.com/ , https://www.myrasecurity.com/en/product-content-delivery-network/ https://www.myrasecurity.com/en/product-content-delivery-net..., https://www.leaseweb.com/cdn https://www.leaseweb.com/cdn . If anyone has any personal experiences with any of these please share.
- shintoist 18d ago
  I've been using bunny.net for a while and it's not bad. It has some rough edges, but it does what it's supposed to and I haven't experienced any downtime. The main "gotcha" is that there's no free plan, it's a minimum of $1 per month, you pay for usage. In practice it's very hard to spend more than a dollar in a month.
  - spiderfarmer 18d ago
    I spend 40 euros per month, with 75% because of AI scrapers.
- draxen 18d ago
  None of them have the unmetered anti-DDoS and global CDN/caching combination like Cloudflare. Which is weird. CDN requires massive distributed footprint, which inherently provides the enormous network capacity needed to absorb DDoS attacks. So why aren't they offering the same thing as Cloudflare? European CDNs should form partnerships with both European IXPs and Tier-1/Tier-2 ISPs (like Orange, Deutsche Telekom, etc.) to see what exactly is missing to do both unmetered anti-DDoS and global CDN/caching.
  - mitxela 18d ago
    LOL Deutsche Telekom... Their peering policy is "don't".
8by3 19d ago
When someone says cloudflare is too good / cheap to be true... maybe think about it. They have shareholders, who wouldn't allow them to provide value for free, its just not obvious to you how they are extracting that value. Maybe its by capturing a huge % of unencrypted https traffic because if you let them do your certs it means they can read all your real traffic.
- smw 19d ago
  There are lots of companies that provide low end services for free to attract people who may now or in the future be decision makers at large companies.
  - stroebs 18d ago
    For better or worse, the free plan that Cloudflare has provided me for 10 years for my 20-30 hobby/personal domains has gotten them several hundred thousand dollars in business.
  - 8by3 18d ago
    indeed, typically by using their huge cash piles to build a moat around them, so no small new player has a dream of competing. This is why I refuse to give any money to AWS/GCP/Azure or anyone who runs on them.
    - DarkUranium 18d ago
      I'm pretty sure that's impossible nowadays, at least avoiding everything that runs on AWS.
    - mitxela 18d ago
      You should avoid giving them money because they're 50 times more expensive than the competition, not because of that.
- boesboes 19d ago
  I'm pretty sure it's not really any different from a protection scheme that turns into vendor lock in.
bborud 19d ago
If, for a moment, we set aside the fact that Europe is strongly incentivised to depend less on the US, and US companies, it should worry us that so many sectors are dominated by 1-3 or so players. One of the selling points for market capitalism, which we at least pretend to believe in, is efficient allocation of resources through competition. But when the market is dominated by de facto monopolies there exists no real competition and there is no real market. Even in the previous political climate this should, objectively, be deemed a problem. Having 90% of all eggs in one basket is neither good, nor does it constitute functioning market. I'm not sure what the Cloudflare market share is in the US, but if it is the same as in Europe, this is a problem for US companies as well.
helsinkiandrew 19d ago
> I only counted companies that actually run a CDN. If a company serves its site straight from its own origin, it is not in these numbers at all Doesn't this miss websites that serve their own site html but serve (static) assets from a CDN. This seems to be a common pattern with Wordpress sites, presumably because it makes cache configuration simpler
herbertyang 19d ago
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stef25 19d ago
While digging deep to speed up a website loading time, Cloudflare's offerings made the biggest difference. Rocketloader and a few others. Immediately noticeable.
christkv 19d ago
I don't have to talk to any sales person thats the reason I use it.
drchaim 19d ago
How I miss those NET stocks picked up at about 15$ after Covid…what a fail…
hn45e7pbij 19d ago
[flagged]
roshanabdullah1 19d ago
I have been personally using Cloudflare, and I must say, It is a great choice for small sites, even if you are willing to scale, Cloudflare works great! It provides you with all the tools necessary to scale your app.
- piskov 19d ago
  Why not use cheap vps? It will not get down with half of the internet the next time cloudflare has issues.
ericpauley 19d ago
AI;dr
pessimizer 19d ago
Pretty sure that Cloudflare has absolutely no moat in Europe, and could be replaced by any adequately funded European version. Never believe that European talk about separating from the US is anything but slop for the plebs.
- mitxela 18d ago
  Their moat is mindshare.
hnisjafx40 19d ago
the actual asymmetry isn't nsa, it's that cloudflare terminates tls for ~20% of the web in one place — one config push and everyone's plaintext moves.
password4321 18d ago
Surprised to see no mention of Cloudbleed yet, something like that is when this centralization hurts the most.
elai-intelligen 18d ago
If we're speaking strictly on Cost and your ROI, Cloudflare is pretty much unmatched.
pdimitar 18d ago
And? Why should they not use Cloudflare? What do the EU investors do outside of demanding guaranteed profit with zero risk for them? How many are ready to absorb 10-30 years of new infrastructure investments and play the long game? If the EU wants to compete, well, here's the global market, right that way. ==> Get to it. Nobody is actually stopping you. But if you have no appetite for risk, don't complain when one day you realize you don't have EU alternatives.
victorbjorklund 18d ago
Bunny CDN for the win. They are awesome, European and affordable.
bethekidyouwant 18d ago
90% of the CDN market is Cloudflare. I’m not reading this stupid article.
mitxela 18d ago
People rarely reach for a CDN. They only ever reach for Cloudflare. Nobody's reaching for Akamai without a good sales pitch, nobody's tossing up between Akamai and Cloudflare, everyone's using CF because it's free. And they don't need the thing CF offers, they don't go out looking for it, it comes to them and they say "that sounds neat" and set it up.
- seki285 18d ago
  Nobody can also afford Akamai unless you're a fortune 500 company, CDN alternative like bunny.net exist but it lacks so much compared to cloudflare.
  - mitxela 18d ago
    What are your requirements
- everfrustrated 18d ago
  Last I looked you can't even use Akamai without signing a sales agreement ahead of using them.
  - mitxela 18d ago
    That's how most businesses work, yes.
talhaanwar 18d ago
I think everyone use cloudflare in the world. Setting up DNS is not easy without cloduflare. I also use cloudflare tunnels for DNS
- mitxela 18d ago
  what else did you try?
ghoshbishakh 18d ago
Because they are free. Almost for everyone.
trilogic 18d ago
ignorance at the pick
0trip 18d ago
i just found out about cloudflare recently. And it is amazingly smooth compared with GCP and AWS
tlogan 18d ago
The biggest problem with Europe is the lack of innovation. But that was not an issue before. Before the 2000s, Europe was very very strong in telecom (Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel), industrial technology, the auto industry, mobile phones, semiconductors, and enterprise software (SAP, Baan, Business Objects, Dassault Systèmes, sage). Europe was definitely much less dependent on U.S. technology back then. In some area I would say it was the other way around. But Europe's dependence on U.S. technology has accelerated dramatically over the last 10-15 years. I'm really not sure why. Regulation and bureaucracy did not get worse. And Europe even created the EU, which provided a better "single market" (better than before the 2000s). I would love to hear some opinions on what changed.
- mitxela 18d ago
  Before the 2000s, Berlin was still ruled by squatters and illegal techno clubs.
Aditya_0315 18d ago
[flagged]
inemesitaffia 18d ago
It's always surprising to find a website that's not behind CloudFlare, Akamai, DDOS guard or Fastly. BTW CDN is a terrible business. The only thing worse that's adjacent is rural Fiber and seemingly Wholesale IP transit.
- mitxela 18d ago
  I'd tolerate DDOS-guard - they let you host illegal stuff
  - inemesitaffia 18d ago
    I noticed a lot of illegal video sites now host their video itself via CloudFlare. Before they'd use some European host or file locker. I wonder about the economics and how it's hidden.
    - mitxela 17d ago
      Cloudflare tolerates illegal stuff but responds to complaints. Ddos guard is russian and just tells American authorities to F off. I think.
vrighter 17d ago
handing over all of their data to the five eyes... because they have your private keys (or for the "trustless" version, have you generate ephemeral keys on your own server... and then send it to them)
woodsrobertd614 12d ago
[dead]

387 points by adulion 19d ago

Havoc 19d ago

Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there

CommanderData 19d ago
They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up. I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.
- ramon156 19d ago
  big corps = big money. they dont make money from your $5/mth static site, its practically free when you're at CF scale
  - CommanderData 19d ago
    What I was talking about: https://newtrackon.com/ https://newtrackon.com/ 10+ BT trackers using CF likely free tier. Low-end EACH 300-500 MILLION HTTP requests/24hr uncached, some exceed a billion reqs/day (using statistics from other open trackers) 20TB-40TB daily, ~1-3 Gbps sustained. That's a crap load of transfer and compute to process those tiny network connections. As someone that's run a Tunnel on a normal site in the millions, the daemon uses a sizeable amount of CPU and I can't see any reason why it's not the same on the other end. Whatever source CF has going on, kudos to them and their engineering team.
    - viraptor 19d ago
      Lots of people will run http over the tunnel rather than https, so that actually comes out cheaper for CF overall because they don't have to start new TLS sessions.
- tmtvl 18d ago
  If you're not paying, you're not the customer; you're the product.
- pocksuppet 17d ago
  You don't pay with money, you pay with the curses^H^H^H^H^H MITM.
tao_oat 19d ago
They're fine for a CDN but overall their offering surprisingly immature IME. The devx for their hosted scripts/database just isn't there, and e.g. they only allow one global API key with full permissions, etc.
- Havoc 18d ago
  Yeah noticed the key thing too - that seems quite dangerous for things like DNS challenge
jarym 19d ago
Like bunny.net - its still tiny compared to CF but hopefully they will grow and won't adopt the crappier bits of CF.
jarco 19d ago
I tried them with our small company. They seem ... young. Support on discord is not something I can sell to our owners. We sent a ticket that activating some of their services instantly caused bad bots to scan our site, and never got a decent reply on that. Their attitude does not inspire confidence and for that reason we scrapped them as an option. Never actually found a good European option besides them, which is sad.
- kosinus 19d ago
  Like, the bad bots you see when they get an https cert issued and it becomes visible in the public logs, or something else? Agree discord sucks.
- viraptor 19d ago
  > We sent a ticket that activating some of their services instantly caused bad bots to scan our site You assigned a new https certificate around that time, didn't you? Those are public now and will cause an immediate scan.
- bcye 19d ago
  There is a normal support ticket system not on Discord, which they loudly advertise for having a very good response time. The Discord server is not the primary support method
  - AndroTux 19d ago
    In my case, the claim was justified. Got a technical response answering my question in detail after half an hour or so.
    - boesboes 19d ago
      That's also my experience. I did have a few instances of 'random requests failing' they couldn't really diagnose back when they were new; but that was just amazon dropping request in the end Service has been great, prices like 10% of cloudflare too once you get the real pricing :P
frevib 19d ago
We use them en they have improved a lot in the last year. For edge services they have all the important thing like ddos protection and edge scripting. There is no replacement for Cloudflare Tunnel, but frp [1] is a good alternative. We don’t miss Cloudflare one bit. [1] https://github.com/fatedier/frp https://github.com/fatedier/frp
s_dev 19d ago
https://eualternative.eu/categories/cdn/ https://eualternative.eu/categories/cdn/
- sparkling 19d ago
  Bunny is the MVP among these European alternatives. It's not just a CDN, it offers Cloudflare-style Edge scripting, Edge workers, databases (Sqlite compatible) etc.
  - s_dev 19d ago
    MVP would be widely understood on this forum to mean "Minimum Viable Product", I don't think that's what you meant. Options are always good to have.
    - boesboes 19d ago
      true, but MVP -> most valuable player might be even more common on the internet, interesting conundrum tbh haha
bakugo 19d ago
Something to consider if you're looking at Bunny.net: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710845
- breakingcups 18d ago
  I wonder of the CEO ever got back with an update. It seems awfully quiet in that thread.

maxcoding 19d ago

I feel like your site needs a CDN, it takes over 40 seconds to load your front page from the EU.

dotcoma 19d ago
Maybe a European CDN, like Bunny (Slovenia)
- unglaublich 19d ago
  Do they also have their own infra or are they just an entity between the customer and AWS?
  - ramon156 19d ago
    They have their own infra but its not the size of CF. Chicken and Egg

noir_lord 19d ago

Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue.com/blog/european-cdn-concentration-cloudflare-nine-in-ten https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue... Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months. Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier. Personally I think we absolutely should, I just don't think we will. Barring them doing something so egregiously awful we don't have the choice, Governments can move fast when they want to but efficient government scares the shit out of me because it rarely happens outside of a genuinely serious crisis.

embedding-shape 19d ago
> Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier. I'm thinking the opposite might be the way to go here. We already know that "retaliation" comes from the US government regardless if you did something or not, so most of us (Europeans) have stopped pretending there is a way of preventing it. Even more, if we piss off Trump enough, he might be dumb enough to try to block European access to CloudFlare, or something similar and maybe even dumber. So with this, maybe the goal should actually be to try to piss off Trump and the US administration as much as possible, in order for them to start reacting and cutting off some stuff, so we (again, Europeans) basically gets forced off CloudFlare et al. Lots of companies already finished moving away from storing their primary data in the US, lots of companies is in process of doing so (albeit some look like they'll take forever) but also lots of companies still aren't prepared for the future, would be nice if US government could make the decision a bit easier for them to make :)
- microtonal 19d ago
  While I theoretically agree, the issue is that Trump will connect economical issues to blowing up NATO Article 5, leaving NATO completely, or retracting intelligence or Starlink for Ukraine. So for the most part, the EU has to work slowly and under the radar. That said, my worry is that we'll be back to business as usual if the midterms look favorable. Even the urgency present during January's Greenland threats was gone after a few months. I fear that we don't have the long-term focus and planning to make sovereignty really happen. But I'd love to be surprised.

bildung 19d ago

I'd also be interested in share of companies using a CDN in the first place. UK has 17k sites, while France and Germany, so countries with about equal and higher population than the UK, have only 4k and 6k sites behind a CDN. I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?

wiether 19d ago
Their index being paywalled, it's not possible to answer about its content. I wanted to check if the 5 customers for which I already did a change on their Cloudflare settings today where on the list, but can't do.
embedding-shape 19d ago
> I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany? Maybe our countries are just small enough to not be overwhelmed by traffic? Most websites I've built and launched for Spanish national companies, that only have other Spaniards as users and customers, haven't needed any CDN at all, because you don't suddenly get 1K req/s. Meanwhile, launch a global website in English, that even get the slightest amount of popular, and all of a sudden you reach 1K req/s very quickly. Add on top that people usually don't even give two cents about performance, and adding CDN on top as a saving grace seems like an easy tradeoff. So, why add a CDN when you don't need it? :) Probably 80% of everything I've ever deployed never needed a CDN in the first place, but I also save it as a thing in my toolbox to be used sparingly, rather than a default thing I slap on top of everything.
- ivlad 19d ago
  nginx can do about 20krps per CPU for static files. You only need CDN if you want to improve time to DOM loaded in locations where time to first byte is over ~100ms and can be improved with local caching. If all your users are in Spain and you don’t care how fast your site loads for a techbro in California, you indeed don’t need CDN.

cbg0 19d ago

> The front door is not the whole stack Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN? On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to help keep you online and now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business.

dwroberts 19d ago
[flagged]
- cbg0 19d ago
  I was explaining why I believe it's a super popular service. I have no affiliation or stock, just a regular user.
- microtonal 19d ago
  I think they articulated the underlying issue well. Cloudflare is too attractive for individuals and small businesses. For instance, my personal website has a healthy amount of traffic, but means nothing at CDN scale. I considered moving to a EU CDN company, but they all have per GB/TB pricing. It would cost me nothing now, but what if my site comes under attack or someone starts hotlinking a large file? So, I stay with Cloudflare because with their free plan I don't have to worry about such contingincies. I would even be happy to pay for it, but for individuals and small business the 'black swan' events that could bankrupt them will keep them from switching to a pay-as-you-go service.
- glimshe 19d ago
  My PM buddies speak like this about any subject.
embedding-shape 19d ago
> now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires CDN and that somehow $200/month is a small amount of money for a small business.

vaylian 19d ago

Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?

embedding-shape 19d ago
Depends on your use case. If you have a very inefficient backend (maybe legacy project?), you have massive amount of traffic (say 100K req/s or above) or you really must have sub-500ms latency absolutely everywhere in the world, then it might make sense to slap a CDN (or similar) on top of that. In pretty much any case outside of that, it makes no sense to waste the time, money or effort on CDNs. But, all the CDN companies seemingly have convinced half the internet that you absolutely must use a CDN, otherwise you'll get hacked/broke/killed/sent to the moon, and they've been successful with this campaign too seemingly.
- esseph 19d ago
  Data scraping. If anything else, the AI machine wants near constant streams of new data, even if it already checked with you 30ms ago. A CDN helps immensely. Also keeps you from getting DDoS'd if you did something like run it off your home connection.
  - embedding-shape 19d ago
    Your webserver most likely have "rate limiting" built in already, which you can configure to act based on lots of variables typically. Set a limit of 1 req/s or whatever, and you've stopped 99% of all DDoS you'll encounter on the public web. If your visitors get cranky, up it to 10 req/s and you still are preventing most of the "abusive traffic", granted your backend/website isn't completely upside down when it comes to performance and resource usage. CDN is something you do once you run out of options, not something you should reach for immediately, it makes no sense in most cases of just hosting a website.
    - deleted 18d ago
      [deleted]

chrocni380 19d ago

[flagged]

Steve16384 19d ago
How did you extrapolate that leap of logic? Maybe we suck at business.
- ilikerashers 19d ago
  We have stagnant economies with slow adopters and shallow capital markets. EU tech companies are working with hands tied behind their backs. The US deserves it's success.

schnebbau 19d ago

Yeah because it's priced well and it works. It's a no-brainer. (Also if it does go down, well so has everyone else so no big deal) Also in this list of GOATed companies: Tailscale, Ubiquiti.

deleted 19d ago

[deleted]

pjmlp 19d ago

The problem is that we have spent 40 years adopting US technology, across multiple generations of software developers and decision makers, while everyone was supposedly on the same side. It will take similar amount of years to go back into the cold war heterogeneous computing landscape of the 60, early 90s. This assuming there would be an willingness across all European countries to actually push for that, and not jump out when it gets too hard and search for compromises instead. This is why most sovereignty initiatives focus mostly on SaaS products and hardly on actual computing devices.

sajithdilshan 19d ago
Even if EU countries want to push for their own solutions, the biggest problem is the capital. The governments cannot fund this with tax payers money because they have other critical problems to solve and private companies only go far if they can make a profit. Only time will tell how far this sovereign movement would go. Maybe when the US would have a president/government from the Democratic Party someday in the future. EU would cozy up again to US and go back to how things were. There’s no permanent enemies or allies when it comes to politics and at the end of the day it all revolves around money
- pessimizer 18d ago
  > The governments cannot fund this with tax payers money because they have other critical problems to solve The governments can's solve this problem because the entire economic model of the EU is that the core exploits the periphery, who don't have a currency that they can weaken as a response. If they had a strong democratic central government and a real central bank in the EU, they'd be forced to make transfer payments to the weaker members, and to bail them out (losing the leverage to make elite demands on them.) The EU as a whole could easily solve the problem, they have the population, the talent, and the infrastructure. They're just really docile from the CIA and their own elite cliques working on them for the better part of a century. > Only time will tell how far this sovereign movement would go. There is none. Blah blah blah in the media isn't a "sovereign movement." It's a campaign to get you to vote for the same middle of the road radical centrist neocons served on a substrate of normie-relaxing anti-Trump rhetoric.

em500 19d ago

Tale as old as time (or at least as the 1970s): nobody ever got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Cloudfare / AWS / Azure. 9 out of 10 corporate decisions are for blame avoidance / ass covering.

chpatrick 19d ago
It's actually a great service though.
- viraptor 19d ago
  It's also a great protection racket. They host many DDoS provider sites and protect them from law enforcement.
  - viraptor 19d ago
    Someone's eager to downvote this, but it's been known for a long time and still happens in obvious ways. First page of results for booter services contains https://zeusstress.com/ https://zeusstress.com/ which is hosted by Cloudflare (yes yes, ceo will send lawyers to say they only proxy not host - doesn't matter in practice)
edelbitter 19d ago
.. 9 out of 10 unhappy customers are currently unable to cause any blame, because they cannot even reach customer service because they are getting the "bot" treatment.
Danoch 19d ago
[dead]

amelius 19d ago

But isn't a CDN a commodity? I.e., you can switch to a different one with almost no effort.

pyvpx 19d ago
How does that quip go again…there are only two difficulties in computer science, cache invalidation, naming things, and counting. Going from one CDN to another can be infuriating even at a surprisingly small scale. Mostly (imo) from caching semantics and counting.
- amelius 19d ago
  Can you give a practical example?
kypro 19d ago
It's not really a commodity when Cloudflare is often cheaper, simpler and provides a better service compared to it's competitors. For it to be a commodity there would be no good reason to pick Cloudflare over any alternative and this absolutely isn't the case.
AndroTux 19d ago
Depends how deeply integrated it is. Cloudflare offers a web application firewall that can quickly become complex, alongside features like custom routing rules, input parsing, custom headers, etc. As soon as you start integrating any of those into your environment, migration becomes more difficult fast.

tunahanfaruksav 19d ago

[flagged]

dakolli 19d ago

In the late 90s and early 2000s the NSA and other US intelligence agencies underwent massive efforts to basically privatize the gathering of intelligence. Its a lot easier to fund your "total information awarness" initiatives via public markets and private investors than to ask congress for money to do so. So they did just that. "In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contacted Unspam Technologies, asking, "Do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is?" The DHS' email served as the impetus for Cloudflare, a technology company Prince co-founded with Holloway and fellow Harvard Business School graduate Michelle Zatlyn the following year." --Matthew Prince's Wikipedia page. Dont for a second think cloudflare's generous free tier offerings are out of the goodness of their heart. They're a giant fkin MiTM project for the US governemnt. And of course, cloudflare isn't the only one.

tolusky 19d ago

[flagged]

cassianoleal 19d ago
Do you mean US national security?

Yash16 19d ago

[dead]

iamislida 19d ago

[dead]

jillesvangurp 19d ago

It's seriously good value for small websites. Basically, there is no cost aside from the domain. And for registering and managing domains, they are pretty much the most affordable option as well. And they have a few other things that aren't half bad to use with pretty generous freemium layers. We used Google's CDN for the last six years or so but it's pretty annoying to deal with and you have to pay for a load balancer every month in order to properly use it. That adds up to quite a bit per year. Even if all you are doing is routing domains to some bucket with a website. We migrated most of our gcloud stuff to Hetzner beginning of the year. That left a load balancer and a few static websites hosted in Google buckets. I migrated all of that to Cloudflare just a few months ago. I still have a few buckets in gcloud proxied via a vm in hetzner with a proxied domain in Cloudflare. Not the most elegant route but it works. I might optimize some of that later. At this point, we pay for some Google buckets and not much else in gcloud. Honestly, Google and AWS need to start paying attention to Cloudflare more. Their complexity is chasing people towards Cloudflare. The hoops you have to jump through with both of them to host a simple website with their CDNs is embarrassing. I've gone through the process with both of them. Although my experience with Route53 is a bit stale at this point. On Cloudflare, getting an new website up and running with a freshly registered domain takes only a few minutes.

pocksuppet 19d ago
The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers. Cloudflare is the LG TV of websites, but it's worse because we've known it has an always-on microphone and speech-to-text for over a decade and we still keep using it for some reason.
- CommanderData 19d ago
  Is there any evidence of this
  - bcye 19d ago
    Well it is known SSL termination servers are a popular target: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-nsa-taps-google-yahoo-data-center-links/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...

tonyhart7 19d ago

so instead of developing actual competent solution, European complaining about why US tech dominate ????? what stopping europe from using their home ground solution ??? nothing this is just a skill issue take

throw93947309 19d ago

[flagged]

bdauvergne 19d ago
Is it satire ? Laws apply to the publisher not to the TLS endpoint.
AndroTux 19d ago
This has to be rage bait, right? Ever heard of GDPR? How about ICE?
- throw93947309 18d ago
  ICE does not have a jurisdiction in europe.
  - AndroTux 18d ago
    Exactly.

shevy-java 19d ago

The EU needs to stop giving money to the USA in general. They contribute to their own demise by doing so. Canadians understand this so much better than the EU, so the only logical conclusion to be made is that the EU is currently controlled by US lobbyists. This would explain about 80% of the issues; the remaining issues are inertia within the EU, but it also isn't made any easier when the US government constantly favours US mega-corporations ruthlessly infiltrating and abusing other markets.

VBprogrammer 19d ago

Cloudflare interstitial pages are becoming the new cookie / GDPR pop-up for me. Remember when the internet used to be good?

viraptor 19d ago
Unfortunately that one's on the operators. I can complain for days about CF, but nobody is forcing the companies to default to giving everyone a managed challenge page. Some do, because either they don't care or don't realise the extra cost.
cassianoleal 19d ago
Same but they're so much worse than cookie banners...

dansmet 19d ago

[dead]

ObscureScience 19d ago

My employer uses CDN77. Only for serving static resources.

simondotau 19d ago
But do they offer even 10% of the features Cloudflare offers to free customers? To imply that Cloudflare is merely a fancy CDN is to miss the whole point.
- Tepix 19d ago
  It's the same issue as being cloud agnostic. If you use their unique features, you're locking yourself in. Is it worth it?
  - simondotau 18d ago
    I get it. I’ve consciously avoided that exact trap with AWS. But Cloudflare aren’t giving me “features” so much as they’re allowing my site, which is routinely DDOSed, the ability to remain online at all.

jamesnorden 19d ago

You have to ask why they're so "generous" with giving away free services.

bell-cot 19d ago
Looking back over the past 3-ish decades, becoming utterly dominant in some part of "essential" stuff on the internet has a way of paying off big. Or, they discuss their free stuff at length here - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000147733326000016/cloud-20251231.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000147733326.... (That is Cloudflare's 10-K for calendar 2025 - scrutinized by serious investors, and with heavy penalties for lying.)

raverbashing 19d ago

It's hard to beat the "free DDoS" protection of CF. Could even be considered dumping in a way

CrimsonRain 19d ago

[flagged]

DuncanCoffee 19d ago
4edgy5me
bean469 19d ago
> This article is as useful as writing sky is blue. Subtle

parasxos 19d ago

In control systems, one vendor behind nine out of ten front doors has a name: common-mode failure. We get audited for it. The web apparently calls it best practice.

Zaheer 19d ago

Has anyone used Cloudflare's enterprise bot packages and have first hand experience with AWS's equivalent offering? Would love to chat.

postepowanieadm 19d ago

Company samples are tiny.

arjie 19d ago

Cloudflare is a great service and nearly free on low traffic sites. This describes a surprising amount of competence among European webmasters of small sites.

nonethewiser 18d ago
Yeah this is basically my reaction. 9/10 use it because it's obviously the best solution. The real point is what's between the lines: A growing number of European techies are not optimizing for the best technical solution. At least on hackernews. The observed stat says otherwise, up to this point in time at least. Personally I love using cloudflare. I am always surprised to see the hate from devs here. I would expect it to be beloved.

miu33 19d ago

[dead]

nottorp 19d ago

Cloudflare is the only CDN with a free tier that's basically enough for personal use and even a small organization, right?

reincoder 19d ago

I was looking into the IPv6 adoption of US government websites (https://community.ipinfo.io/t/the-state-of-ipv6-across-us-government-federal-state-county-and-beyond/7352 https://community.ipinfo.io/t/the-state-of-ipv6-across-us-go...) when we discovered that Cloudflare had essentially dethroned Akamai for government content hosting over a number of years. The post primarily focuses on IPv6, but according to our data, Cloudflare hosts 70% of US government websites.

deleted 19d ago
[deleted]

thih9 19d ago

What are some EU based alternatives? Edit: I found https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare , which lists among others: https://bunny.net/ https://bunny.net/ , https://www.keycdn.com/ https://www.keycdn.com/ , https://blazingcdn.com/ https://blazingcdn.com/ , https://www.myrasecurity.com/en/product-content-delivery-network/ https://www.myrasecurity.com/en/product-content-delivery-net..., https://www.leaseweb.com/cdn https://www.leaseweb.com/cdn . If anyone has any personal experiences with any of these please share.

shintoist 18d ago
I've been using bunny.net for a while and it's not bad. It has some rough edges, but it does what it's supposed to and I haven't experienced any downtime. The main "gotcha" is that there's no free plan, it's a minimum of $1 per month, you pay for usage. In practice it's very hard to spend more than a dollar in a month.
- spiderfarmer 18d ago
  I spend 40 euros per month, with 75% because of AI scrapers.
draxen 18d ago
None of them have the unmetered anti-DDoS and global CDN/caching combination like Cloudflare. Which is weird. CDN requires massive distributed footprint, which inherently provides the enormous network capacity needed to absorb DDoS attacks. So why aren't they offering the same thing as Cloudflare? European CDNs should form partnerships with both European IXPs and Tier-1/Tier-2 ISPs (like Orange, Deutsche Telekom, etc.) to see what exactly is missing to do both unmetered anti-DDoS and global CDN/caching.
- mitxela 18d ago
  LOL Deutsche Telekom... Their peering policy is "don't".

8by3 19d ago

When someone says cloudflare is too good / cheap to be true... maybe think about it. They have shareholders, who wouldn't allow them to provide value for free, its just not obvious to you how they are extracting that value. Maybe its by capturing a huge % of unencrypted https traffic because if you let them do your certs it means they can read all your real traffic.

smw 19d ago
There are lots of companies that provide low end services for free to attract people who may now or in the future be decision makers at large companies.
- stroebs 18d ago
  For better or worse, the free plan that Cloudflare has provided me for 10 years for my 20-30 hobby/personal domains has gotten them several hundred thousand dollars in business.
- 8by3 18d ago
  indeed, typically by using their huge cash piles to build a moat around them, so no small new player has a dream of competing. This is why I refuse to give any money to AWS/GCP/Azure or anyone who runs on them.
  - DarkUranium 18d ago
    I'm pretty sure that's impossible nowadays, at least avoiding everything that runs on AWS.
  - mitxela 18d ago
    You should avoid giving them money because they're 50 times more expensive than the competition, not because of that.
boesboes 19d ago
I'm pretty sure it's not really any different from a protection scheme that turns into vendor lock in.

bborud 19d ago

If, for a moment, we set aside the fact that Europe is strongly incentivised to depend less on the US, and US companies, it should worry us that so many sectors are dominated by 1-3 or so players. One of the selling points for market capitalism, which we at least pretend to believe in, is efficient allocation of resources through competition. But when the market is dominated by de facto monopolies there exists no real competition and there is no real market. Even in the previous political climate this should, objectively, be deemed a problem. Having 90% of all eggs in one basket is neither good, nor does it constitute functioning market. I'm not sure what the Cloudflare market share is in the US, but if it is the same as in Europe, this is a problem for US companies as well.

helsinkiandrew 19d ago

> I only counted companies that actually run a CDN. If a company serves its site straight from its own origin, it is not in these numbers at all Doesn't this miss websites that serve their own site html but serve (static) assets from a CDN. This seems to be a common pattern with Wordpress sites, presumably because it makes cache configuration simpler

herbertyang 19d ago

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stef25 19d ago

While digging deep to speed up a website loading time, Cloudflare's offerings made the biggest difference. Rocketloader and a few others. Immediately noticeable.

christkv 19d ago

I don't have to talk to any sales person thats the reason I use it.

drchaim 19d ago

How I miss those NET stocks picked up at about 15$ after Covid…what a fail…

hn45e7pbij 19d ago

[flagged]

roshanabdullah1 19d ago

I have been personally using Cloudflare, and I must say, It is a great choice for small sites, even if you are willing to scale, Cloudflare works great! It provides you with all the tools necessary to scale your app.

piskov 19d ago
Why not use cheap vps? It will not get down with half of the internet the next time cloudflare has issues.

ericpauley 19d ago

AI;dr

pessimizer 19d ago

Pretty sure that Cloudflare has absolutely no moat in Europe, and could be replaced by any adequately funded European version. Never believe that European talk about separating from the US is anything but slop for the plebs.

mitxela 18d ago
Their moat is mindshare.

hnisjafx40 19d ago

the actual asymmetry isn't nsa, it's that cloudflare terminates tls for ~20% of the web in one place — one config push and everyone's plaintext moves.

password4321 18d ago

Surprised to see no mention of Cloudbleed yet, something like that is when this centralization hurts the most.

elai-intelligen 18d ago

If we're speaking strictly on Cost and your ROI, Cloudflare is pretty much unmatched.

pdimitar 18d ago

And? Why should they not use Cloudflare? What do the EU investors do outside of demanding guaranteed profit with zero risk for them? How many are ready to absorb 10-30 years of new infrastructure investments and play the long game? If the EU wants to compete, well, here's the global market, right that way. ==> Get to it. Nobody is actually stopping you. But if you have no appetite for risk, don't complain when one day you realize you don't have EU alternatives.

victorbjorklund 18d ago

Bunny CDN for the win. They are awesome, European and affordable.

bethekidyouwant 18d ago

90% of the CDN market is Cloudflare. I’m not reading this stupid article.

mitxela 18d ago

People rarely reach for a CDN. They only ever reach for Cloudflare. Nobody's reaching for Akamai without a good sales pitch, nobody's tossing up between Akamai and Cloudflare, everyone's using CF because it's free. And they don't need the thing CF offers, they don't go out looking for it, it comes to them and they say "that sounds neat" and set it up.

seki285 18d ago
Nobody can also afford Akamai unless you're a fortune 500 company, CDN alternative like bunny.net exist but it lacks so much compared to cloudflare.
- mitxela 18d ago
  What are your requirements
everfrustrated 18d ago
Last I looked you can't even use Akamai without signing a sales agreement ahead of using them.
- mitxela 18d ago
  That's how most businesses work, yes.

talhaanwar 18d ago

I think everyone use cloudflare in the world. Setting up DNS is not easy without cloduflare. I also use cloudflare tunnels for DNS

mitxela 18d ago
what else did you try?

ghoshbishakh 18d ago

Because they are free. Almost for everyone.

trilogic 18d ago

ignorance at the pick

0trip 18d ago

i just found out about cloudflare recently. And it is amazingly smooth compared with GCP and AWS

tlogan 18d ago

The biggest problem with Europe is the lack of innovation. But that was not an issue before. Before the 2000s, Europe was very very strong in telecom (Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel), industrial technology, the auto industry, mobile phones, semiconductors, and enterprise software (SAP, Baan, Business Objects, Dassault Systèmes, sage). Europe was definitely much less dependent on U.S. technology back then. In some area I would say it was the other way around. But Europe's dependence on U.S. technology has accelerated dramatically over the last 10-15 years. I'm really not sure why. Regulation and bureaucracy did not get worse. And Europe even created the EU, which provided a better "single market" (better than before the 2000s). I would love to hear some opinions on what changed.

mitxela 18d ago
Before the 2000s, Berlin was still ruled by squatters and illegal techno clubs.

Aditya_0315 18d ago

[flagged]

inemesitaffia 18d ago

It's always surprising to find a website that's not behind CloudFlare, Akamai, DDOS guard or Fastly. BTW CDN is a terrible business. The only thing worse that's adjacent is rural Fiber and seemingly Wholesale IP transit.

mitxela 18d ago
I'd tolerate DDOS-guard - they let you host illegal stuff
- inemesitaffia 18d ago
  I noticed a lot of illegal video sites now host their video itself via CloudFlare. Before they'd use some European host or file locker. I wonder about the economics and how it's hidden.
  - mitxela 17d ago
    Cloudflare tolerates illegal stuff but responds to complaints. Ddos guard is russian and just tells American authorities to F off. I think.

vrighter 17d ago

handing over all of their data to the five eyes... because they have your private keys (or for the "trustless" version, have you generate ephemeral keys on your own server... and then send it to them)

woodsrobertd614 12d ago

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