I see a lot of people putting their home stuff behind CloudFlare, but when I reviewed their free tier, I didn’t actually see any security benefit to outweigh the privacy loss, and I didn’t see that covered on your blog post.
The main thing is being able to hide your origin IP address. That turns many types of DDoS attacks into CloudFlare's problem, not yours, and it doesn't matter that you're on the free tier[0]. If you firewall to only allow traffic from CF[1], then you can make your services invisible to IP-based port scans / Shodan.
CloudFlare isn't a magic-bullet for security, but, used correctly, they greatly reduce the attack surface.
Whether any of that is worth the privacy / security risk of letting CloudFlare MITM your traffic is up to you.
1. This is hosted on GCP. Actually was thinking of using Cloudflare Argo once my GCP credits expire so that I can truly self host all this (although all I have is an old machine).
2. For me, Cloudflare makes my websites load faster on pages. Security wise, I have pretty much everything enabled... like always on HTTPS, etc. and I some strict restrictions on SSHing into my instance (also note that none of my ip addresses are exposed thanks to Cloudflare), so really I'm not sure what security risk there may be.
3. How am I losing privacy loss? Just curious, not really understanding what you're saying there.
Browser <> CF, CF<> source server. Two distinct TCP sessions. Both potentially encrypted, but there’s no E2E encryption anymore.
Can you elaborate on this? Maybe I misunderstand you, but is there a good way to get HTTPS from your home?
1. Been using it for 3+ years. Whenever I'm making a site, there's nothing better than easily making some DNS records and making sure they're all always-on HTTPS.
2. A little bit of the first part: It's a hassle to setup my own certs, etc.. I feel that Cloudflare "protecting" my IP from DDOS and other attacks is far better than anything that I can setup easily (at least from my experience, I think they know what they're doing)
3. Maybe in the future when I have some time and money I'll do everything on my own and ensure I have E2E encryption. At the moment, anything I'm running isn't mission-critical and isn't used by hundreds of people; I'm not making a SaaS startup. I understand your concern, but the ease of use of Cloudflare is something I value.
4. Analytics. I've come not to trust Google Analytics at all. I'm not sure what they're doing, but most if not 100% of tech-savy people have adblock, which blocks GA. My VPN from AlgoVPN blocks GA and anything related to GA, FB, Twitter, etc. So I'm not really sure how much I can trust GA's analytics opposed to Cloudflare giving me the exact numbers on how many people requested or visited my site. (I'm going to make my own analytics soon since Fathom has turned to profit only and not open source).
> 3. How am I losing privacy loss? Just curious, not really understanding what you're saying there.
I understand the benefit of CF, and it’s for each person to decide for themselves what they consider acceptable or not.
> Cloudflare giving me the exact numbers on how many people requested or visited my site. (I'm going to make my own analytics soon since Fathom has turned to profit only and not open source).
We could do this in the 90s with our web server logs. It didn’t involve third parties or paid tools or centralising logging and sacrificing privacy. Tooling for simple stats has existed for literally more than two decades.
I'd suggest that Argo is a waste of money if you have control of your router, you don't need to secure unencrypted HTTP traffic, and your ISP isn't port-blocking. Block all traffic except from CF's IPs, configure Authenticated Origin Pulls, and use SSL for your CF<->Origin traffic (your own cert or CF's).
If you don't meet all of those conditions, a cheap VPS as a VPN server is probably a better value (plus you get a VPS to do other stuff with).