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Comment by VladVladikoff | Hacker News Reader

I am not a fan of the growing trend that Cloudflare is the gatekeeper of the internet. Personally I will never support this company, or firewall any of my websites behind it.

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Step one: Make a gate everyone uses

Step two: Sell keys to the gate

Muah ha ha

But in all seriousness I wonder who needs this... api's are suppose to make it easy to bridge two application... and you didn't need AI to utilize an api before so I wonder what's pushing this sort of thing to extract value down to individual calls?

I recently had to build a system to drop inbound traffic originating from cloudflare ASNs to prevent bad actors using WARP proxies, no legitimate cloudflare traffic usecases for anything inbound. Getting increasingly sick of cloudflare.

I do something similar seems to get the job done.

    for BadActor in $(curl -A Mozilla "https://api.cloudflare.com/local-ip-ranges.csv"|grep -Ev "::|/32"|awk -F "," '{print $1}'|sort | uniq); do ip route add blackhole "${BadActor}" 2>/dev/null;done

Something similar can be done with AWS EC2

    https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

Fun command chain thanks

Isn’t x402 an open standard anybody can implement?

I'm old-man-yelling-at-the-clouds here. Everyone just uses Cloudflare, which is not a bad thing by itself. But do they _have_ to? Is managing your own edge really that terrifying?

> Is managing your own edge really that terrifying?

It's about convenience, not fear. Cloudflare is free for most companies until you need more advanced features.

So a fear of being inconvenienced then?

I'll show myself out ...

What's more convenient about Cloudflare in front of your server than just your server? I think people use Cloudflare because of the fear of DDoS.

I think DDoS attacks are really what propelled them to the heights it has. The attacks seem to get bigger and bigger by the year. You need a really big pipe to filter them out on before passing on traffic to servers with a much smaller pipe.

Yes, DDoS was definitely their entry point. I remember recommending them to a friend about a year or so after they had launched with the free tier. He was managing a small school district that was dealing with DDoS issues intermittently. What he needed was just outside of free at the time and I believe Cloudflare was still small enough where he had a call with Mr. Prince.

I was a strong proponent of Cloudflare for years, but looking back should have known better. I felt like others in the space would have tracked along how they went to market but that didn't play out as I would have suspected. I still use Cloudflare for DNS on domains that I use sparingly (mostly just for mail records), but no longer recommend anyone let Cloudflare terminate TLS unless they need it.

It's pretty amazing what you can get for a server host (bare metal) these days at the price point. I don't run any of those behind Cloudflare and haven't had any issues as of yet.

For non-corporate entities, it is!

Having an almost a plug and play solution who does CDN + DDoS Protection + WAF/Rate Limiter + Bot Protection, for a few bucks, is very useful for startups and SMEs.

And compared to cloud different offerings, their quick setup and lower cost is hard to beat.

DDoS protection and the number of features they offer are kind of unmatched.

I often see threads complaining about Cloudflare, never see suggestions for better alternatives.

It would be economically impossible for me to run a small personal website without Cloudflare thanks to the sheer quantity of badly behaved automated traffic on the Internet in 2026.

What happened when you tried?

I got stuck with a very large bill for bandwidth overages due to bots hammering my photo gallery on my website. With Cloudflare in front I've since been running my site for years off a $10/mo VPS.

How much bandwidth was that?

Dumb question here - how can I manage effectively edges across the whole world without the huge maintenance overhead? Which tools would be recommended for that? I e.g. have a VPS at Hetzner with Coolify but users from the US have high latency. I wouldn't know how to not use CloudFlare?

See also the deranged post from the CEO, gloating about firing employees: https://archive.is/gSrfU.

I'm in awe at how tone deaf and naive the CEO comes across in this article. It reads like a comically ominous punchline from Gavin Belson.

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