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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

> If you're going to centralize in Cloudflare you might as well just skip the hosting the website bit entirely and make a business account on Facebook as your host.

These responses are getting bizarre. Facebook pages have nothing to do with web hosting or Cloudflare.

Also, hosting on a single server in a single datacenter is, literally, the definition of centralized. Cloudflare distributes the content to a huge number of edge nodes which are spread around the world. How did we end up in this situation where people are calling the distributed solution centralized and suggesting a centralized solution as the alternative?

Because cloud flare administratively centralizes a solution that was previously distributed.

Guess what percentage of websites Cloudflare could take down in minutes if they decided?

It doesn’t matter if cloudflare itself uses a distributed architecture. It’s a massive central point of failure/malice.

If cloudflare did that, then you do a simple DNS change and host your content somewhere else.

You are ALWAYS going to be contracting with a third party to provide your connection to the internet... why is trusting cloudflare not to block you riskier than trusting your ISP or the data center that has your server?

> If cloudflare did that, then you do a simple DNS change and host your content somewhere else.

You missed the point. It’s an illustration of how much of the global internet cloudflare intermediates and can eavesdrop, filter. Guess how many tor users you fucked by putting cloudflare between you and them. Vpn users, etc.

Then... use something else? Cloudflare doesn't do anything to lock you in

>Guess what percentage of websites Cloudflare could take down in minutes if they decided?

Yes and? People change their DNS entry and will never come back.

Yup, I’m still wrapping my head reading these comments, “bizarre” is the word I was looking for.

Conflating cloudflare's distributed architecture with distributed control is just silly. It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim.

"Non-commercial" might be a better way to understand this point of view. Instead of prioritizing profit (the reason for people using cloudflare, it's cheap and good) the idea is to minimize the damage done by large centralizing forces on the internet. So, in the above comment I suggest Facebook as an equal option because it is analogous to using Cloudflare. The intent was to get you to think like a human person and not a business owner or employee on the clock. It's short term gain for long term damage to the internet.

But then again, if Cloudflare terminates your account, the website is still up; it's just going to be slower, and you're going to pay more to serve the same number of users. There's no lock-in there that I can see.

>It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim.

As opposed to the CEO of Amazon/Rackspace/your favorite host here who doesn't have the ability to terminate your account? What are you saying? Or are there other non-profit web hosts and CDNs that I missed?

If you have a personal axe to grind against the CEO of Cloudflare, just say that.

Superkuh's point is that depending on any single service to protect/host/route your content is setting up oneself up to be Parler'd or 8chan'd. It doesn't matter how good the technology. If you don't any have any control over it, you're one copyright strike or bad mood from a CEO away from being deplatformed.

There's.no need to grind an axe to observe how past actions have set the course for the future, perhaps for the worse.

>If you don't any have any control over it, you're one copyright strike or bad mood from a CEO away from being deplatformed.

Again, _as opposed to what_? Are you saying polyhaven should go multi-cloud and spend triple what they need? You aren't actually presenting any real solutions, you are just complaining about the cloudflare ceo.

I'm a guy who wants to host a service. You are telling me Cloudflare bad. What is the alternative, and how do I ensure the CEO of that service doesn't null route me?

>Again, _as opposed to what_? Are you saying polyhaven should go multi-cloud and spend triple what they need? You aren't actually presenting any real solutions, you are just complaining about the cloudflare ceo.

I haven't complained or suggested a damn thing in my previous comment. All I've provided is an extended summary of Superkuh's comments and supported those claims with evidence of past events. Exercising due diligence shouldn't be regarded as a controversial position.

>I'm a guy who wants to host a service. You are telling me Cloudflare bad.

I'm telling you that depending on a single service, whether that service is Cloudflare, Youtube, AWS, etc., is a bad idea. If you don't have a credible alternative provider you can migrate to at a moment's notice, you're website and content is at risk.

>What is the alternative, and how do I ensure the CEO of that service doesn't null route me?

Alternatives:

https://www.esecurityplanet.com/products/distributed-denial-...

https://www.techradar.com/news/best-ddos-protection

Not mentioned is DDos-Guard, which has a pretty good offering if you don't mind that it's in Russia (perhaps that even might be a bonus)

You can't ensure the CEO of a company doesn't null route you. That's why it's important to have alternatives and plan migration ahead of time.

>You can't ensure the CEO of a company doesn't null route you.

So the alternatives aren't better than Cloudflare, Superkuh just had an axe to grind specifically with Cloudflare. And there is no an alternative solution that wrests control from a CEO having a bad day.

At the end of the day, he's still at the whims of the Cloudflare/Bunny/Akamai and if he wants to be fully in control he must spend millions building his own CDN.

It's not as if Cloudflare has major switching costs either.

Any alternative is better than everyone using Cloudflare. This would be true even if Cloudflare hadn't already demonstrated their untrustworthiness. It's true for LetsEncrypt even if LE is awesome and really improved the internet and there are other options. If people only use one thing in practice it is a locus of control.

"Why are you using this thing that solves your problems and does it cheaper than you making your own solution to your problems? You're leading to centralization of the internet!" Good luck changing human nature. Writing these comments here is helping, I'm sure of it. /s

It's a caching layer. If you're deplatformed from your caching service, you still have the backing service.

To be fair, Parler and 8chan did deserve to get Parler'd and 8chan'd respectively. To also be fair, even if you are not Parler or 8chan, it is a valid concern.

Dealing with fraud and abuse has _long_ been a centralizing force on the internet. Think about email which is the way it is largely because of spam. We need to structurally stop spam not just shame people from embracing solutions that make their life easier.

It's interesting - I see Cloudflare a rising force against network attacks more than its CDN properties. It will become the defacto centralized network. Not sure if I like that philosophically, but practically and as a engineer, most enterprises will choose to get their DDoS, WAF, Zero Trust products. Networks are the most vulnerable part of the internet infrastructure. Cyber warfare isn't just a talking point on a 60-minutes episode, it is a real threat to large businesses and they'll opt for centralized control over decentralized risk. They'll keep Cloudflare CEO in check, if not the shareholders/BoD.

No. The definition of "centralized" that matters here is "everyone hosting their website in the same place, using the same vendor".

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