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There's something baffling about making a strong stand for net neutrality while promoting the heavily centralized web. Cloudflare seems like a neat company, a

There's something baffling about making a strong stand for net neutrality while promoting the heavily centralized web. Cloudflare seems like a neat company, and I enjoy their technical posts here and elsewhere very much, but the phenomenon they represent is just as harmful to the web as the object of this protest.

hitchhiker999 12y ago
Unfair! They are providing a damn good service in the current paradigm. They are standing up for something important in a reasonable way. Decentralisation will be the next great hurdle, I'm sure we've all been thinking about it for a while now - no need to dismiss those trying to get something done before then.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Google provides damned good email services in the "current paradigm" while operating essentially as the vanguard of the centralized Internet.
- idlewords 12y ago
  The whole net neutrality debate is an artifact of centralization. It wouldn't exist without near-monopoly ISPs and very large companies that dominate online traffic. From that perspective, fighting for net neutrality is papering over a more fundamental problem.
rdl 12y ago
You could make an argument that CloudFlare is centralization, but you could ALSO make an argument that CloudFlare, by letting smaller sites continue self-hosting but using CloudFlare for scaling, is also more decentralized than the realistic alternatives. I'd ALSO prefer a world where everyone can get 10G to the home/office, great power, and global anycast with a bunch of sites around the world, from an infinity of vendors without strong content controls. Unfortunately, the alternatives to CloudFlare-like services seem to be: 1) Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc. -- if you're popular or controversial, this isn't great. 2) Hosting with large global entities (AWS, Google, etc.) with much more restrictive content policies, and with greater control over the technical stack you use. 3) Setting a pretty high floor for cost or technical competence to host a site (you're a clear outlier on the technical competence side in 2014, with colo'd boxes. sadly) I love being able to spin up a random VM on my personal colo'd hardware, behind CloudFlare, and know it can deal with attacks or load; it would cost me a lot to build every random thing entirely on its own. There are some potential issues with using CloudFlare for certain kinds of sites (turning over SSL keys, for instance, if you want us to handle your https traffic), but we have technical solutions to those, some of which we've presented over the past year, such as "keyless ssl", where you continue to retain custody of the private key and we just ask you every time we need to open a session to a new user. It's not a perfect solution, but I think using CloudFlare is actually the best available choice for a lot of sites, and we're trying to make it better all the time. And yes -- the end of Net Neutrality probably wouldn't hurt CloudFlare very much; it would arguably make it harder to run a site without it, or without going to some kind of provider who has also negotiated with the access networks. This isn't really a commercial decision so much as a "we like the free Internet and support it" decision.
- spindritf 12y ago
  Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc. I heard a rumour[1] that you guys drop users on smaller plans when they get hit. Supposedly people get an e-mail WHY WAS MY SITE TEMPORARILY DEACTIVATED? CloudFlare runs a globally distributed network serving millions of websites. Sometimes a large DDOS attack to one of our Free or Pro customers may degrade network performance. In these cases, we may temporarily remove the website under attack to avoid network degradation. and they're on their own. Is it true? [1] http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-polski-odpowiednik/page-2#entry421175 http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-polski-o...
  - khc 12y ago
    I don't know if it's true or not, but given that they've paid nothing, doesn't that seem perfectly fair?
  - eli 12y ago
    Just like there's no such thing as "unlimited data storage" there isn't really such a thing as "unlimited DDoS protection." I assume there's SOME limits on how much you get with a free or even $20 plan. I can only imagine what the companies that specialize in DDoS protection charge.
    - spindritf 12y ago
      Sure. But if protection starts at $200/mo (CloudFlare Business) then it's not really for smaller sites with a controversial opinion. For $200 you can get two dedicated servers with DDoS protection on top.
      - valarauca1 12y ago
        2 dedicated servers might buy you ~3-4GB/s of DDoS protection. Cloudflair's base model protects from around 100GB/s, which what commonly takes banks offline (Bank of American, or Chase be taken down with ~70GB/s). They gave talk at defcon21 about migrating a 300-400GB/s DDoS (Roughly 1.25% of all internet traffic in the US at the time was that DDoS). When you start getting into DDoS's >300GB/s your DDoS will start causing issues for providers, and backbone companies, not just Cloudflair.

hitchhiker999 12y ago

Unfair! They are providing a damn good service in the current paradigm. They are standing up for something important in a reasonable way. Decentralisation will be the next great hurdle, I'm sure we've all been thinking about it for a while now - no need to dismiss those trying to get something done before then.

tptacek 12y ago
Google provides damned good email services in the "current paradigm" while operating essentially as the vanguard of the centralized Internet.
idlewords 12y ago
The whole net neutrality debate is an artifact of centralization. It wouldn't exist without near-monopoly ISPs and very large companies that dominate online traffic. From that perspective, fighting for net neutrality is papering over a more fundamental problem.

rdl 12y ago

You could make an argument that CloudFlare is centralization, but you could ALSO make an argument that CloudFlare, by letting smaller sites continue self-hosting but using CloudFlare for scaling, is also more decentralized than the realistic alternatives. I'd ALSO prefer a world where everyone can get 10G to the home/office, great power, and global anycast with a bunch of sites around the world, from an infinity of vendors without strong content controls. Unfortunately, the alternatives to CloudFlare-like services seem to be: 1) Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc. -- if you're popular or controversial, this isn't great. 2) Hosting with large global entities (AWS, Google, etc.) with much more restrictive content policies, and with greater control over the technical stack you use. 3) Setting a pretty high floor for cost or technical competence to host a site (you're a clear outlier on the technical competence side in 2014, with colo'd boxes. sadly) I love being able to spin up a random VM on my personal colo'd hardware, behind CloudFlare, and know it can deal with attacks or load; it would cost me a lot to build every random thing entirely on its own. There are some potential issues with using CloudFlare for certain kinds of sites (turning over SSL keys, for instance, if you want us to handle your https traffic), but we have technical solutions to those, some of which we've presented over the past year, such as "keyless ssl", where you continue to retain custody of the private key and we just ask you every time we need to open a session to a new user. It's not a perfect solution, but I think using CloudFlare is actually the best available choice for a lot of sites, and we're trying to make it better all the time. And yes -- the end of Net Neutrality probably wouldn't hurt CloudFlare very much; it would arguably make it harder to run a site without it, or without going to some kind of provider who has also negotiated with the access networks. This isn't really a commercial decision so much as a "we like the free Internet and support it" decision.

spindritf 12y ago
Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc. I heard a rumour[1] that you guys drop users on smaller plans when they get hit. Supposedly people get an e-mail WHY WAS MY SITE TEMPORARILY DEACTIVATED? CloudFlare runs a globally distributed network serving millions of websites. Sometimes a large DDOS attack to one of our Free or Pro customers may degrade network performance. In these cases, we may temporarily remove the website under attack to avoid network degradation. and they're on their own. Is it true? [1] http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-polski-odpowiednik/page-2#entry421175 http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-polski-o...
- khc 12y ago
  I don't know if it's true or not, but given that they've paid nothing, doesn't that seem perfectly fair?
- eli 12y ago
  Just like there's no such thing as "unlimited data storage" there isn't really such a thing as "unlimited DDoS protection." I assume there's SOME limits on how much you get with a free or even $20 plan. I can only imagine what the companies that specialize in DDoS protection charge.
  - spindritf 12y ago
    Sure. But if protection starts at $200/mo (CloudFlare Business) then it's not really for smaller sites with a controversial opinion. For $200 you can get two dedicated servers with DDoS protection on top.
    - valarauca1 12y ago
      2 dedicated servers might buy you ~3-4GB/s of DDoS protection. Cloudflair's base model protects from around 100GB/s, which what commonly takes banks offline (Bank of American, or Chase be taken down with ~70GB/s). They gave talk at defcon21 about migrating a 300-400GB/s DDoS (Roughly 1.25% of all internet traffic in the US at the time was that DDoS). When you start getting into DDoS's >300GB/s your DDoS will start causing issues for providers, and backbone companies, not just Cloudflair.