# Cloudflare 744 Hacker News commenters recommended Cloudflare and 1249 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 3 years (26 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended for strong DDoS and bot protection and shielding origin servers, much of it free or cheap, though critics cite outages that take down huge parts of the web. ## Why people recommend it - Generous free tier, cheap paid plans (6 comments): "it is easy to setup and manage and because the amount of value you get for free or just a few bucks per month can't be matched by any other company" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45967266)) "Cloudflare have more locations than you so offer lower latency and can offer it at a cost that's cheaper or the same price as doing it yourself" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45967085)) "works well, not too expensive... but, and consequently of all those positive attributes, positioning itself at the center of everything" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669700)) - Strong DDoS and bot protection (6 comments): "their anti DDOS solution is just too good. But their serverless products/features don't really build on that, they are just another hosting company" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291993)) "Thankfully we're using Cloudflare so could block all of them except real search engine crawlers and now we don't have any problems at all." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122986)) "Cloudflare free tier is still a no-brainer. If you're huge and actually get attacked: pay for Cloudflare Enterprise or equivalent." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46160621)) - Hides and shields origin servers (4 comments): "one of the value propositions for using a service provider like CloudFlare is catching and mitigating theses exploits as fast as possible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46165233)) "Cloudflare offers some genuinely valuable services that protect you from exposing your infrastructure to the world wild web" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130628)) "Free way - sign up for a cloudflare account. Use the DNS on cloudflare, they wil put their public ip in front of your www." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46308091)) - More reliable than self-hosting (4 comments): "I'd rather have my website going down (along with half the internet) be the concern of a billion dollar corporation with thousands of engineers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45966481)) "Assuming cloudflare’s uptime is above average, outages affecting everything at once is actually better for the average internet user." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46168964)) "I assure you that my use of Cloudflare services ($0 in nearly 10 years) is much more reliable and much cheaper than hardware I run." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980438)) ## What people warn about - Outages take everything down (6 comments): "The largest downside is the reliability of the Cloudflare platform, as if it goes down, you'll have problems accessing any of the exposed services" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748945)) "feature creep, half-baked releases, and improper communication don't give me the confidence to continue using their services at scale." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46744488)) "They're shipping at an astonishing pace but I think there have been far more outages than there were before in jgc era." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319921)) - Too much internet centralization (4 comments): "works well, not too expensive... but, and consequently of all those positive attributes, positioning itself at the center of everything" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669700)) "a billion dollar enterprise controlling a significant part of internet traffic self identifying as a "utility." If cloudflare deserves more of something from us, it is scrutiny and accountability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790974)) "a significant part of the web is now incredibly dependent on Cloudflare and no matter how many times we face issues with huge consequences nobody seems to care" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47968686)) - Half-baked products, confusing dashboard (3 comments): "feature creep, half-baked releases, and improper communication don't give me the confidence to continue using their services at scale." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46744488)) "Cloudflare's whole admin console is rather incoherent. The tunnel configuration makes very little sense unless you understand the product in quite a bit of detail" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45807188)) "To me each and every single service provided by Cloudflare feels somewhere between not ready for production or lacking any semblance of a product manager." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45801311)) - Ignores abuse from its customers (3 comments): "Cloudflare intentionally not policing its customers even a little bit, but i still isde with CF - they're the less bad guys." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48724187)) "I find cloudflare a much more scammy company than Perplexity. I had a DDoS attack a few years ago which originated from their network, and they had zero interest in it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46178179)) "Tons of phishing and malicious websites use CF nameservers to prevent ddos attacks and etc and Crimeflare will not terminate their access or accounts when reported" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794188)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Bunny.net](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bunny-net.md): 121 recommend - [Amazon CloudFront](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-cloudfront.md): 24 recommend - [Cloudflare CDN](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-cdn.md): 12 recommend - [Fastly CDN](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fastly.md): 10 recommend - [Cloudflare Workers Cache](https://hackerapproved.com/p/workers-cache.md): 10 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.cloudflare.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Cloudflare", https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).