CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) | Hacker News Reader

CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me)

slashgeek.net

31 pointspavs9 comments

I am on the SRE team for Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow mentioned in the article. We have had a lot of issues with 503 errors (Cloudflare cannot reach our origin servers) occurring in various regions on a monthly basis. That combined with a few other issues (DNS change delays, missed deadlines) has lead us to look for another CDN provider.

We just signed a new contract and plan on switching off CloudFlare in June.

We use CF and haven't seen any 503 issues recently. We don't use their DNS service since that's down more often than it's up, so it's possible that's what you're seeing?

As for the article, you can just set CF to 'Essentially Off' and it doesn't do anything stupid.

If you configure CF properly, it's hard to beat.

FWIW we've used Cotendo, Akamai, EdgeCast/Verizon, etc. For $200/month, CF can't be beat. It's not as fast as EC (easily the fastest CDN for most of the planet), but it's also 15x cheaper.

I hope you didn't sign with Akamai.

CloudFlare also makes it nearly impossible to surf the web these days using Tor without having Javascript enabled. Tor triggers the captchas, and they don't seem to be solvable without Javascript.

I had that problem, but if you examine the image boxes in the recaptcha there is a checkbox in the corner, properly check them and then click submit. You then get a block of text to copy-paste into another textarea, after that you should be able to continue, even without JS.

I run several sites using Cloudflare business and pro features but I have all the captcha and malicious user detection stuff turned off. I encountered one of those once and I saw just how annoying it could be to our end users, a majority of whom are in China and SEA.

I'm not using Tor. Yet, I can't browse without using a proxy. Without a proxy, I'll have to solve captcha for almost every website I visit.

At first, I believed their error message which claimed that a malicious software was causing the issues.

Naturally, I blamed my extensions. Disabling all of them didn't work.

Don't remember why I used a free proxy software but I noticed that the captcha requests disappeared.

This article raises some good points I wouldn't have considered (since I'm browsing the web from California).

With respect to the security: Why do think this is the case? Are they just big, bad meanies? Are they doing this at random? Or are your countrymen obnoxious to the point that such defensive measures are required to protect cloudflare's customers and business? Their defenses aren't free to them either, you know, so there has got to be some kind of business reason for cloudflare to spend the money on them.

>Their defenses aren't free to them either, you know, so there has got to be some kind of business reason for cloudflare to spend the money on them.

The business reason exists, the point is, to think about what the reasoning behind it was, and whether it is valid. For e.g. it could be for pure marketing reasons, or the result of not understanding the consequences, or because they were copying some other business' decision, or because they got the wrong advice from a security consultant, or about a million other explanations as to how/why businesses make decisions - other than some ideal that all business decisions are the result of pure rational thought.

Oil changes are not free, and yet people continue to think they need to do them every 3000 miles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com