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.

Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - 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.

• k__

  today at 9:38 AM

  Yeah, I think only in crypto the non-us providers have a leg up, because running a node just needs an instance.

• bryanrasmussen

  today at 9:35 AM

  lots of efficient government happens outside of a serious crisis, but then you don't notice it.

• embedding-shape

  today at 9:18 AM

  > 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

    today at 9:35 AM

    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.

    • philipallstar

      today at 9:41 AM

      I don't think the EU has the capability to work fast and just is opting not to.

    • embedding-shape

      today at 9:42 AM

      > Even the urgency present during January's Greenland threats was gone after a few months.

      There are troops deployed on Greenland right now ready to defend the island. The threat is not gone from the minds of the people there or in the rest of Europe just because you stopped reading about it on CNN or whatever.

      Edit: I got curious if this part is even possible:

      > leaving NATO completely

      Apparently not. Congress enacted a specific prohibition in 2023, now codified at 22 U.S.C. §1928f. It says that the president may not "suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw" the US from the North Atlantic Treaty unless either two-thirds of senators present consent, or Congress passes an Act authorizing it. It also prohibits federal funds from being used to carry out an unauthorized withdrawal.

      Seems some parts of the US has indeed managed to setup defenses against such idiocracy.

• expedition32

  today at 9:40 AM

  Compared to the Spanish empire, Napoleon and Hitler the Americans are but whiny children. It would be one last hurrah for my country to break away.

> 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

  today at 9:21 AM

  Do you get paid commission for comments like this? Genuinely feels like an ad-read

  • cbg0

    today at 9:34 AM

    I was explaining why I believe it's a super popular service. I have no affiliation or stock, just a regular user.

  • microtonal

    today at 9:40 AM

    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

    today at 9:42 AM

    My PM buddies speak like this about any subject.

• embedding-shape

  today at 9:22 AM

  > 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.

  • viraptor

    today at 9:43 AM

    > you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you

    This works for cases where the traffic takes too long to process. Once you get 3gbit traffic on your 1gbit link, you can't do anything yourself - the only thing that can save you is a bigger pipe.

    • embedding-shape

      today at 9:46 AM

      > Once you get 3gbit traffic on your 1gbit link, you can't do anything yourself - the only thing that can save you is a bigger pipe.

      Realistically, out of the DDoS we typically see, how many are in fact "they had bigger pipes than you"? I've come across that once in my ~3 decade career maintaining infrastructure for websites, some quite popular. Most of the time the attacks are relatively low-effort and easy to stave away, there been one time when the attacker seemed to have basically endless amount of resources, and yes, that time we ended up with emergency calls to Akamai.

      But again, those sort of attacks seem to happen seldom, and I don't think people should default to trying to prevent them. Deal with that once you get there, because most websites and services never get there in the first.

  • cbg0

    today at 9:30 AM

    What you're paying for is business continuity, not for them to host your site. I know you can host the site itself on much cheaper infrastructure.

    • cyphar

      today at 9:48 AM

      If your site is static you can host it on CF pages for free with unlimited* egress.

      * of course it's not unlimited unlimited but I've not heard of anyone being cut off.

  • bryanrasmussen

    today at 9:57 AM

    I think their delusion is probably in what they consider a small business. A lot of people on here, given their work experience, think of small as something with a few hundred employees.

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

• jarco

  today at 9:42 AM

  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.

• frevib

  today at 9:58 AM

  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

• tao_oat

  today at 9:30 AM

  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.

• jarym

  today at 9:41 AM

  Like bunny.net - its still tiny compared to CF but hopefully they will grow and won't adopt the crappier bits of CF.

• CommanderData

  today at 9:27 AM

  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

    today at 9:30 AM

    big corps = big money. they dont make money from your $5/mth static site, its practically free when you're at CF scale

    • CommanderData

      today at 9:43 AM

      I should have referenced what I was thinking about: https://newtrackon.com/

      There's at least 10 HTTP trackers using CF, using statistics from other open trackers on the low end some of them process 300-500 MILLION requests every day - uncached, some exceed a billion reqs/day. That's a crap load of transfer and compute to process those tiny network connections.

      As someone that's run a Tunnel on a much lesser site still 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.

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

• dotcoma

  today at 9:09 AM

  Maybe a European CDN, like Bunny (Slovenia)

  • unglaublich

    today at 9:23 AM

    Do they also have their own infra or are they just an entity between the customer and AWS?

    • ramon156

      today at 9:30 AM

      They have their own infra but its not the size of CF. Chicken and Egg

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.

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.

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

• viraptor

  today at 9:31 AM

  It depends on what you're trying to serve, but it's used to either save you money or as an insurance (or both). You don't need a CDN overall. But if you grow large enough, at some point you'll run into one of these three situations:

  - Your public traffic costs you so much to repeatedly process that it's cheaper to let some service cache the common responses instead. (Where the cache size is larger than anything you'd want to support yourself. For example, if it's <1G and survives your service restarts, you may want to do it yourself)

  - Your customers on the other side of the world start complaining that the resources take ages to load.

  - Someone floods you with enough traffic that you can't respond to real customers traffic anymore. You get a ransom email to pay them to stop. But there are enough groups doing that that paying is useless because someone else will try again in a few days. If you're providing a service where people pay you to use the website, you're losing money until you solve this problem.

• _joel

  today at 9:34 AM

  Reduces latency when the cached content is served from a local cdn pop, allows you to absorb some level of DDoS, can absorb traffic spikes more easily so infra can be more static, reduces load on server if assets are dynamically generated on the backend but can are cacheable, some senses can lead to simpler deployment as you serve assets from an object bucket, so no need to deal with keeping that data in your cluster, but that's minor. There are downsides too, cost, over caching, privacy/security perhaps too.

• unglaublich

  today at 9:29 AM

  Because an average request would have to travel half the globe, so setting up a simple HTTPS connection would already take a second. That's completely unacceptable for static content.

  Not only would transfer be slow, they would also be much more pressing on the network as the request would occupy huge stretches and many interconnects and switches.

  Furthermore, it hardens the website against DDoS and adds robustness for regional failures.

  • ivlad

    today at 9:53 AM

    Minority of sites have global traffic. This is especially true for non-English sites.

    So, while average request may have to travel quarter (not half) of the Internet globe, median request from the set of requests that matter has much lower latency.

    Barcelona to Stockholm is about 65ms, ~35ms to Amsterdam, ~43ms to Frankfurt.

    HTTP/3 is ubiquitous, you don’t get TCP handshake penalty anymore in major browsers.

• pluc

  today at 9:26 AM

  This article being down/slow is a great response.

  • vaylian

    today at 9:42 AM

    Not to discount the experiences that other have, but the site loads fine for me.

• esseph

  today at 9:26 AM

  The site this is about is current down due to HN traffic.

  Lol

• embedding-shape

  today at 9:25 AM

  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

    today at 9:27 AM

    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

      today at 9:42 AM

      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.

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?

• embedding-shape

  today at 9:14 AM

  > 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

    today at 9:39 AM

    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.

• wiether

  today at 9:12 AM

  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.

• pajamasam

  today at 9:22 AM

  I'd be interested in what data they're using in the first place. It looks like their data is behind a paywall.

  Also, funny that their page with for "Companies running Cloudflare" says there are only "887 European organisations using Cloudflare."

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

• pyvpx

  today at 10:04 AM

  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.

Cloudflare is the best security company In the world.

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.

Europe sucks at tech?

Well I’ll be damned.

I would’ve never expected that.

• Steve16384

  today at 9:35 AM

  How did you extrapolate that leap of logic? Maybe we suck at business.

  • ilikerashers

    today at 9:44 AM

    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.

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

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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.