CloudFlare, We Have a Problem
This whole post is ridiculous and comes off as some personal attack without much technical merit:<p>- Every big network company is at the mercy of government. Not sure what the point is here... so we should ban all big companies? Everyone from the ISP to the website host to the network equipment manufacturer can and might be compromised.<p>- Every CDN today is a reverse proxy and MITM is what they do. That&#x27;s just how it fundamentally works. No magical way around this.<p>- CF supports websockets now in addition to HTTP(S) for every plan. If you need more protocol support than use a service specialized for that, CF clearly states that they don&#x27;t focus on mail or game servers.<p>- Who cares if they do mitigation? What I want is my origin to be protected, that&#x27;s it. If they soak it up with network capacity or have advanced processes doesn&#x27;t matter to me.<p>- Free plans are free, so they have every right to kick you off if you consume too many resources and are getting DDOS&#x27;ed all the time. Pro plans also get plenty of protection, you have to be seriously under attack to have them contact you about it. And in that case, 200&#x2F;month is probably one of the cheapest options considering most other hosts (like AWS) will be happy to bill you like crazy or just cant even handle it.<p>- The &quot;under attack&quot; option is supposed to pose problems, because you&#x27;re under attack. It&#x27;s pretty clear that it&#x27;s not the normal mode of operation. Don&#x27;t turn this on unless you really need it.<p>- Not sure what the issue is with having to whitelist bots with them. A whitelist approach is far better than trying to maintain an infinite blacklist. Also they are more advanced than simple IP filters, that approach stopped working a decade ago.<p>- Connectivity is not good, even in much of the western world, and varies widely between location, device, capacity, etc. Latency is a real physical limitation that can only be overcome by being closer to users. Try browsing a site in another continent that&#x27;s not using a CDN and see what happens. Also CF <i>is</i> a CDN, not sure how &quot;use a CDN&quot; was an answer to this.<p>The only real criticism is their Flexible SSL option that doesn&#x27;t encrypt the connection to the origin and this has been debated endlessly. I think their recent announcement of free origin certs are a way to improve this but ultimately it&#x27;s a potential security risk and up to the website operator to understand.<p>We use CF because they provide DNS, CDN, SSL, free bandwidth, DDOS protection and better features than others for a single flat price. It works really well for us but it&#x27;s about understanding how it really works and the trade-offs. If this doesn&#x27;t work for <i>you</i> and your security or business needs, then use something else.