4 ms·

If there's any company in the world that can survive a lot of extra traffic being pushed through their systems it's Cloudflare. I bet these new tunnels end up

• aliasxneo 16d ago
  Yeah, I don't doubt their infrastructure at all. In fact, I rate them fairly high in terms of reliability and performance. I've honestly been a fan of them for a very long time - it's just I'm watching all of this centralization happen and it sets my Spidey sense off. Like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
  • simonw 16d ago
    Gotcha, that totally makes sense.
  • swozey 16d ago
    The "centralization" which is cloudflare basically running its own walled garden version of the interent (how often do you see a cloudflare page checking if you're human?) is exactly why a lot of people do NOT like cloudflare. And if you've known about CF and its leadership since their inception you'd be even more wary of sticking your stuff over there. I've migrated many companies off of cloudflare, usually because they end up pissing off companies when a contract renewal comes up and they slam them with massively increased bills and almost useless support if you aren't very high paying enterprise. I don't know how many CF support tickets I've just given up on over the last 15 years, usually related to their admin page, workers or some weird thing their system does that wasn't documented and I just stop getting responses and definitely don't get fixes. If you ever worked in webhosting the Cloudflare wordpress/etc extensions are everywhere and back when I did work in hosting tons of support tickets were made because of CF. Could be way better now, I don't go near that industry these days. The casual CF user sticking it in front of a blog they rarely look at and the business forced CF user has a very different experience. I cringe and seriously consider if I'm interviewing for an infra role and they use cloudflare. Usually it's startups that grew into larger businesses.
• eli 16d ago
  Don’t the free tunnels have explicit limits on bandwidth and streaming?
• bix6 16d ago
  It’s a concentration of power issue.
  • robertlagrant 16d ago
    Given they seem to mostly offer services that are about as easy to switch away from as you could hope for, compared to, say, companies who write loads of CF that only runs on AWS, and I can't imagine why this keeps on being said for Cloudflare specifically. What power do they have?
    • mitxela 16d ago
      It doesn't matter that they're easy to switch away from. It matters that people haven't actually switched away from them.
      • robertlagrant 15d ago
        Can you explain why it doesn't matter that they're easy to switch away from?
        • mitxela 15d ago
          Because it only matters whether people actually switch away from them.
          • robertlagrant 14d ago
            Why?
• ceejayoz 16d ago
  I didn't take it as a capacity concern, but a "how much data do they get to look at" one.
• Tepix 16d ago
  They see all the traffic in cleartext. Plus you have to trust them not to maliciously alter your traffic. As a US company, their options may be limited if they are coerced by their government to do so.
  • insanitybit 16d ago
    Just use TLS / mTLS over the tunnel, no?