Cloudflare

Long-term owners

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.

Nov 2025 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• Bunny.netA cheap, pay-as-you-go European CDN with edge scripting, popular as a Cloudflare alternative, though critics cite a data-loss bug downplayed for 15 months and a poorly handled security incident.121recommend
• Amazon CloudFrontRecommended for cheap, fast content delivery with a free tier and tight S3 integration. Critics note its SLA is only three 9s.24recommend
• Cloudflare CDNPeople recommend it for a free CDN tier with no bandwidth fees, speed and reliability; critics object to its centralizing power and its traffic inspection.12recommend
• Fastly CDNPeople recommend Fastly for performance, security and worldwide scale that holds up under heavy traffic. Critics point to egress costs and awkward configuration.10recommend
• Cloudflare Workers CacheLets Cloudflare Workers return cached responses without running the worker again, with cache tags for invalidation. Critics warn it may raise bills because of how requests are counted.10recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 2752 comments. Each links to the original.

1. 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

   Mixed · May 2026 · in “Cloudflare Flagship”

2. 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

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to”

3. 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

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “State of Homelab 2026”

4. 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

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to”

5. 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

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Multiple Digital Ocean services down”

6. 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.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Facebook's Fascination with My Robots.txt”

7. one of the value propositions for using a service provider like CloudFlare is catching and mitigating theses exploits as fast as possible

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025”

8. works well, not too expensive... but, and consequently of all those positive attributes, positioning itself at the center of everything

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all”

9. feature creep, half-baked releases, and improper communication don't give me the confidence to continue using their services at scale.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Tell HN: Cloudflare's D1 service degraded since 2 days”

10. Assuming cloudflare’s uptime is above average, outages affecting everything at once is actually better for the average internet user.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025”

11. 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.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Mojo-V: Secret Computation for RISC-V”

12. Cloudflare free tier is still a no-brainer. If you're huge and actually get attacked: pay for Cloudflare Enterprise or equivalent.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Cloudflare Down Again – and DownDetector Is Also Down”

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

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Monetization Gateway”

14. The new cloudflare products for blocking bots and AI scrapers might be worth a shot if you put so much work into the content.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Opus 4.6”

15. Cloudflare intentionally not policing its customers even a little bit, but i still isde with CF - they're the less bad guys.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “European ISPs Want Rightsholders Held Accountable for Overblocking Damage”

16. Cloudflare offers some genuinely valuable services that protect you from exposing your infrastructure to the world wild web

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Spain has blocked access to freedom.gov”

17. Free way - sign up for a cloudflare account. Use the DNS on cloudflare, they wil put their public ip in front of your www.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero”

18. I consider my server's real IP (or load balancer IP) as a secret for that reason, and Cloudflare helps exactly with that.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues”

19. Running behind something like Cloudflare doesn't just protect against DDoS, it protects against surprise traffic spikes.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to”

20. Every major cloud provider (including Cloudflare) is orders of magnitude better at keeping 9s of availability worldwide

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025”

21. They're shipping at an astonishing pace but I think there have been far more outages than there were before in jgc era.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages”

22. 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

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Cloudflare claimed they implemented Matrix on Cloudflare workers. They didn't”

23. 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.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025”

24. Cloudflare sometimes crashes (it happened super recently remember?) and in that situation -> ALL your services accessible through the tunnel are "down" for your users.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world”

25. 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

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Anonymous credentials: rate-limit bots and agents without compromising privacy”

26. 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

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023)”

27. 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

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga”

28. A change made to how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare's network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Cloudflare was down”

29. 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.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023)”

30. Why did we start treating Cloudflare (a public, for-profit company) as the undisputed authority on anything related to the network layer of the internet

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Cloudflare CEO Is Lying to You About the Bot Traffic Jump”

31. Their featureset and DX is the best in the industry IMO but their data sovereignty features are sadly not really good enough for most EU enterprises we talk to.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Danish Gov agency to ditch Microsoft software in push for digital independence”

32. Cloudflare's business model appears to be wait till someone is generating lots of bandwidth and then give them 30 days to move up a tier or be closed down.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself”

33. I support CF's fight to keep the internet open against encroaching EU regulation while also acknowledging that the US has been a recurring bad actor here.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Cloudflare CEO on the Italy Fines”

34. I probably would not use Cloudflare if it had KYC simply because I do not want to be interrogated every time I try to do something meaningful online.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Phishers are hijacking legitimate cloud infrastructure”

35. I do appreciate these post mortems from Cloudflare, however I wish they would include timestamps of their status page posts in their timelines.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Route leak incident on January 22, 2026”

36. Just reading what they are demanding from Cloudflare and their reasoning for it is enough to turn pretty much anyone to Cloudflare's side

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “AWS European Sovereign Cloud”

37. It's not a bad option nowadays, but I feel the strongest option is going with a provider that charges money for the service provided

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains”

38. it's the path straight down the middle. Providing tools for producers and consumers to do things with permission and compensation.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers”

39. enabling a single cache rule on a specific path added anywhere from 300-600ms latency on every route, just completely untenable.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Matthew Prince on why Cloudflare offers a free version and always will (2016)”

40. having it happen at the cdn level is the perfect silent upgrade for millions of sites without the owners needing to do anything

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Cloudflare targets 2029 for full post-quantum security”