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Comment by 0xbkt | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare + Backblaze B2 (or Wasabi) beats this hard. They are Bandwidth Alliance partners, so you won't incur egress traffic cost in B2 side. Cloudflare's Free plan is more than enough in most cases. Also B2 gives you free 10 GB storage when you sign up.

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79 cents cheaper = "beats this hard" with no analysis of the performance or reliability differences? Or even time to set up? B2 is still missing basic website functionality that you have to code and test yourself. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071273

Cloudflare has way more points of presence than AWS Cloudfront even inside US and Europe, set aside countries like Russia or Australia. There's no point using Cloudfront unless you deeply integrated into AWS or negotiated serious price discount.

I have some clients that use Cloudflare, and others that use CloudFront. All of the CloudFront sites perform far better than all of the Cloudflare sites.

I don't care how many points of presence Cloudflare has if the performance is worse.

Just curious, what metrics?

TTFB and total load time

> I don't care how many points of presence Cloudflare has if the performance is worse.

Do you have any data that supports your claims?

As I stated, they are client websites, which I don't particularly feel like disclosing. It's trivially easy to find benchmarks. [1] is old, but it gives you an idea of the stark differences that I have seen in practice.

[1] https://goldfirestudios.com/cdn-benchmarks-cloudflare-vs-clo...

[2] https://www.bizety.com/2018/05/01/network-performance-benchm...

I've had poor experiences with Wasabi's availability in practice. Does cloudflare deal with hours-long outages well? Do you know if B2 fares better?

For whatever it's worth, I have had 0 issues with Wasabi availability in about a year and a half of use.

Cloudflare blocks Tor users unless they solve a Google CAPTCHA and accept cookies. By saving money you limit your audience and make the world a worse place.

https://blog.torproject.org/trouble-cloudflare

Have you tried visiting a Cloudflare-protected site using the TBB recently? (as in within the last few years?). We don't block Tor users. I use TBB to browse and don't see this problem.

> Users are either blocked outright with CAPTCHA server failure messages, or prevented from reaching websites with a long (and sometimes endless) loop of CAPTCHAs, many of which require the user to understand English in order to solve correctly. For users in developing nations who pay for Internet service by the minute, the problem is even worse as the CAPTCHAs load slowly and users may have to solve dozens each day with no guarantee of reaching a particular site. Rather than waste their limited Internet time, such users will either navigate away, or choose not to use Tor and put themselves at risk.

So, if we don't make our websites available in languages used by oppressed peoples, if we don't make sure it's very low latency, and if we try to filter out abusive users, we're making the world a worse place. Not just leaving the world in a bad state, but actively increasing the harm done to the world, just by making a website that not everyone can or wants to use.

Not only do I not buy this argument, it makes me want to support Tor less, if for no other reason than blatantly ignoring why the captchas were put up in the first place.

I agree with most of what you're saying but then I don't agree with your assertion that this makes you want to support Tor less.

The part you have a problem with, that it actively increases harm done in the world, wasn't even an assertion made by Tor.

Tor users using this e-commerce service are probably a tiny fraction of a percent of the op’s addressable market: easily a “who cares” demographic.

TOR and most e-commerce aren’t compatible anyhow proper opsec on any anonymizing Network is to not de-anonymize yourself by tying your activity to your identity.

If you use TOR to access services that can be directly correlated to your identity you are simply using a slow VPN at that point.

AFAIK Cloudflare allows site owners to configure that.

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