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Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

> Tell HN: Cloudflare is breaking the internet

Fixed that for you. Cloudflare is a dark force of centralization operating under the threat of "but what if my forum with 10 users gets DDoSed?!" or "I'm too busy to set up Let's Encrypt so I let some random third party who leaks secrets all over the open internet terminate TLS on my behalf."

And bonus now we all have to jump through 15 captcha hoops to load some stupid website barely worth visiting anyway. Who gives a flying fuck if bots look at your ugly website anyway?

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... I don't think people are using cloudflare to protect something willy nilly.

My general experience is, if you host a popular site, it will be DDOS'd.

If you host a site in a 'competitive' space, you will get DDOS'd.

I've seen it all personally, forums, image upload sites, NFT galleries, and SAAS health tech even, people will spend a couple hundred dollars to make you miserable.

If you don't have protection, they can literally see how you are falling and it only encourages further spend.

Worth mentioning that Cloudflare also hosts those DDOS services and prevents them from being shut down.

Like what?

do you have a sauce on that? it's a really big charge.

I spoke too strongly to say they keep them online intentionally. The services do per se violate their AUP but because CF protects their identity, CF becomes the arbiter of taking them offline, and doesn't always agree to do so.

> ... I don't think people are using cloudflare to protect something willy nilly.

I do, it's a buzzword. Cloudflare, you don't have that? Your not cool unless you do.

With young apprentices learning the ropes of SRE/SysAdmin, DDoS protection has been painted as a #101 of the web when realistically you don't need it.

Also, Cloudflare is one of the easier free gateways to set up for your domain. Lots of people are using that (and Cloudflare apps) and they probably enable these protections without giving it a second thought.

Is putting up a HAProxy instance with some DDoS mitigation rules really that hard?

Congrats you won a self made up argument

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