Every interaction I've ever had with CloudFlare has left me feeling like I needed a bath. The vertical desperately needs some competition but I don't know how that could happen at this point.
Personally, I'd like to see browsers moving away from HTTP for the web, towards something more P2P, so that there is less need for Cloudflare. Something like; look up your site key in DNS, then look up things signed by it in the BitTorrent DHT, and go from there.
Regular client nodes won’t be the backbone of your P2P network these days since many of them are going to be mobile devices. So you are back to a tiered system where you have nodes which are more suitable for hosting (servers) and most suitable for consumers (clients).
We think of the internet as one big flat network, but it's actually a conglomerate of separate networks (interconnected by peering and transit agreements). There are a finite number of networks on the internet. Of those, only some are good CDN locations as you don't need a CDN node on every single network. The number of places where you could possibly ever want a CDN location is finite, with three or four digits.
Cloudflare has a presence in 335 cities - a lot, but not an impossible lot. We're not talking about ten million. Ten million dollars, maybe. (Ten million dollars would be $30k per city - respectable)
How many of Cloudflare's customers even care about all 335 cities? If you're a European business with European customers, you only care about the ~10 mainstream internet exchange sites in Europe (e.g. Frankfurt, London). Cloudflare has 59, but I don't think they need 59. If you want to be a Cloudflare competitor and support European businesses, you only need ~10 physical locations. That's an extremely manageable number.
What you want is at least one peering connection to every major European network, and ideally, a hotline to their NOC or a detailed BGP community agreement, to block attack traffic as close to the source as possible.
I should point out that due to the ongoing collapse of US hegemony, a lot of European institutions would like to reduce their dependence on Cloudflare right now.
And the core issue here is that the site owners want it, so a P2P network that couldn't offer bot protection wouldn't get adopted.
- Lacked free trial
- Had multiple times more expensive price point for the first twee ($2000/mo)
- Where just worse (bad UI, documentation, etc.)
Cloudflare won and grow so big because it was just better product.
And let's not forget they are MITM'm all internet traffic that passes through them, which is a lot of it.