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Comment by cryo32 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's up to their customers not to encourage consolidation.

Microsoft is the proof that customers do want that, or that they don't have a real choice.

I think it's simpler - they don't give a crap.

Until somewhere down the line. Like when half of Spain gets cut off due to an arbitrary block on a consolidated service facade...

Customers shouldn't have to micromanage every service and product like that.

We have antitrust regulations for such things.

What Cloudflare competitors offer a similar range of services?

Do you really need Cloudflare's services to run your business?

Are you genuinely asking "does anybody even need any of their services"?

Yes. I am asking exactly that objective question.

They are advantageous to leverage in certain situations but essential they are not. We're used to, in the technology industry, looking for or creating problems to solve with services we are aware of. Moving back to necessity and need, do we really? Are we being objective? Most of the time, no.

Theres a few alternatives, but at a minimum yes you probably need their or a competitor's Name Servers and their public DNS. Rolling your own isn't very feasible.

DNS hosting is easy if you did want to roll your own, but everyone one does it, especially your registrar. The more sticky bits of Cloudflare are their cloud services, specifically compute (workers) and database and object storage, all wrapped up into a convenient product (Pages). Also their identity and VPN stuff. They've come a long way since just doing DDoS protection/being a CDN.

DDoS protection is pretty essential. I highly encourage you to read through what they offer if you're not familiar.

You said "a similar range of services". Basic DDoS protection is probably important, and there are other companies doing that. Beyond that, it's less obvious.

Akamai, Fastly, HAProxy, F5, many others? Talking about bots specifically, not about "workers" etc.

Akamai is nightmare, they block many user mercilessly. They are worst than Akamai. I don't see issue with other though.

That too, but they need competitors to switch to.

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