Both Lemmy.world and my server rely upon Cloudflare for SSL, DDOS protection, CDN services, etc. I use it to provide me with a Cloudflare tunnel to get around not being able to forward ports.
Outages have put this dependance to question, and the same with recent news about the US government obtaining data through subpoenas. It’s a free service that takes care of many of the difficulties when it comes to hosting your service online, but everyone knows that free is not free.
What do you all think about Cloudflare?
You must log in or # to comment.
I literally can not see most images from lemmy.zip because of the cloudfare craptcha.
Is that what it is? I thought it was just my app being weird, but then I see similar stuff in the browser, too.
In addition to the tech reasons mentioned, the click here checkbox is just a fucking infuriating interruption
Piefed.ca too
Feddit.org uses Anubis
The modern Internet would be way worse without it, but it still sucks how centralized it is.
It’s a free way to get a reverse proxy for a self hosted website and not expose your home IP and avoid attacks, so kind of hard to pass up tbh.
I mainly use Cloudflare for buying domains and DNS settings. Are there better, more resilient alternatives? I am not savvy enough for a hyper custom setup. I think I’ve seen Porkbun mentioned. I’ve used name cheap before. I do pay for NextDNS - is that something that could fit into this? I don’t think so but maybe I’m underutilizing it.
I’m happy with porkbun. They’re pretty well integrated ddclient now, but make sure the version you use has them already
Cloudflare is one of the secret ruling parties of the internet.
I don’t understand why so many Americans like to use it, even the ones who tend to think liberal and go for self hosting.
What are the alternatives?
And a VPS and any number of tunneling systems for the remote reverse proxy.
Rathole is my goto. But SSH forwarding, wireguard… There’s plenty, even ones that will entirely manage the reverse proxy on the VPS.Letsencrypt for SSL, fail2ban for ddos protection, literally just a disk for cdn.
This is probably why so many people use cloudflare. Similarly to discord, their serivices can be found on several different platforms but they are the only ones who offer all of them for free.
deleted by creator
Self-host or die trying !
still need em for DNS (I think)
There are alternate providers, like Cloud9 or Mullvad !
all my computer science and IT knowledge end when it comes to networks.
Honestly if you want to try it on Firefox, they have a few options built-in for alternative DNS !
And I feel your pain, my CS bachelor’s had like 0 courses on Networking, fortunately my current Engineering degree courses have great stuff available, so I’m finally catching up !
Dev here, building a public SaaS app. I’m aware of the centralization arguments, but CF seems to be the least worst of all the options in terms of alternatives. CAPTCHAs are awful, and I can’t put up my own multi-Tbps DDOS buffer. I also regularly access my own resources from behind multiple VPNs; other than having to click the human button it doesn’t consign me to an evening of identifying traffic lights.
What, LLM scrapers still don’t solve captchas, despite being better at them than humans? How come?
The ones that require traffic lights and shit never seem to work properly for me. They always make me do an endless repetition of them, going through dozens and dozens before it finally, maybe lets me see the website I was trying to get to.
Maybe I’m just not human enough?
I’ve found that clicking them slower (until the new image is fully faded in) can help for the ones that have images disappearing after clicking, and not actually clicking every square containing part of the traffic light (if it’s only a tiny edge) helps with the ones that are one image of a thing. I guess being fast or noticing details isn’t human enough. Having to wait is insanely annoying though.
When I’ve used tor, after back on firefox cloudflare put me through endless captchas.
They really do like to penalize people for caring about their privacy, don’t they?
It might be your browser or extensions. I get that more on Librewolf than Mullvad, for example.
it’s making the internet centralized and proprietary, i hate it. i do understand how it’s a very easy option for website operators struggling against malicious bots though.
That and AWS US-East
Can you explain this one a bit more?
us-east-1 was (one of?) the first region for AWS and a lot of their systems don’t respond super well if that region has issues. AWS is also the backbone of a lot of the internet
Isn’t Cloudflare more like the thin horizontal block above that one?
That would imply the web stack wouldn’t crash if you remove them.
It fully is yes
Proprietary centralisation and gatekeeping of the internet, built by a profit first company that actively and deliberately protected nazis and kiwifarms until it became financially harmful for them to continue to do so.
They can fuck right off.
Decent idea, but too much power centralized to one company.
