I can't shake the feeling that since its dealing with a huge amount of network traffic and it also strips SSL from every connection before passing it onto origins, they are a very juicy target for a certain three letter agency to place a tap.
The bit I'm less bothered about is the centralising effect it has on the internet.
They're still decrypting on their nodes, and then re-encrypting before sending to the origin. There's no getting around the fact they can see the traffic as plain text.
Is there a good alt to cloudflare? I don’t want to feed the beast but they are substantially better / cheaper for my use case (domain registrations and tiny websites)
Same, I’d rather not use them but there’s really not much else out there that can offer what Cloudflare does for the price (free). In particular I love the free egress from backblaze.
I’d gladly jump ship if there was a competent competitor, even if paid… within reason.
just sort of a general complaint about how much the internet relies on cloudflare and what that means. massive point of failure, erratic browser checks & outright blocking, surveillance
I mean I think it speaks loudly that a lot of sites, blogs particularly, wouldn't feel so required to use a service like cloudflare if their viewer visible contents were just statically generated rather than requiring notable amounts of resources to compute each visit.
Incredibly disappointing just how many comments are making fun of the site for not handling the traffic, and saying that "they should have just used Cloudflare". Would Cloudflare caching the site have helped? Maybe/probably, but the user's point (visible on the github mirror https://github.com/jiakaiBot/deCloudflare/blob/89983e1501dbb...) has nothing to do with availability and everything to do with Cloudflare's position as a gatekeeper on the internet.
People who have been around for awhile should probably remember the days when every DDoS site on the internet was hosted behind Cloudflare and CF was notoriously slow about responding to abuse complaints or helping them get to the actual hosts on the other side. Or when Matthew went on a whole thing about how he had a moral obligation to provide services to literal nazis.
> Incredibly disappointing just how many comments are making fun of the site for not handling the traffic
Why? It's a deserved, obvious observation. If you're advocating a position but then demonstrate exactly the thing that counters your position, isn't that a worthwhile point? Of course everyone is going to point it out.
An HN front page simply isn't much traffic at all. It really isn't. The fact that so many sites still fall over is simply crazy in 2026. I don't even know how it's possible this is still such an issue. A Raspberry Pi 5 can host an HNing.
The site finally loaded for me, and seriously publishing content is such a ridiculous pattern. It's actually kind of funny that the whole site is falling over because someone decided to publish an opinion in a README, instead of putting it on an infinitely more appropriate static host (which can be built from that git).
In what way does their lack of traffic resilience demonstrate a counter to their position? Their position is not that load balancers and edge nodes are bad.
If I say I hate oversized trucks because one ran me over, my position is not countered by needing someone to deliver my couch.
> In what way does their lack of traffic resilience demonstrate a counter to their position?
When 99.999% of sites utilize Cloudflare for "traffic resilience", as a caching facade that even happens to be geolocated to clients for even more benefit, falling over on exactly that issue kind of obliterates the sales pitch. Every single reasonable person on the planet sees that.
It looks farcically silly, regardless of whatever points it makes or however much I agree with them (yes, CF centralization is bad, it's a company with a mixed history and a lot of bad, it basically has a monopoly now, etc). And yes, there are other CDNs and load balancers and solutions. But presumably someone pushing a position on this has the problem solved beforehand, no?
As to your poor analogy, it's more akin to saying that you hate trucks while trying to drag a couch seven miles from the store.
> Redirect or block "Cloudflare Warp" users from accessing your website. And provide a reason if you can.
come on, really? what does this achieve? only thing i can think of is trying to get the user off of WARP, but i can pretty confidently say that before doing that i'll just not use the website. or if i really care about the content i'll turn it off until i'm done and back on it goes
Tangentially related, the archive.is / archive.today / etc site host used to block anyone using 1.1.1.1 DNS because 1.1.1.1 doesn't send an eDNS subnet to the authoritative DNS server. It accomplishes nothing except annoying actual users.
What does your question imply about your position regarding what he said and what intent can be derived regarding your followup should he entertain your query?
Cloudflare is simply following the time-honored trajectory:
1. Good company starts, with good service and mission
2. Because company has good service and mission, company grows to control a majority of the market
3. Company realizes they can leverage their market for other means and sells their soul to the devil
4. People realize company is no longer good
5a. People leave company
-or-
5b. Company is now a monopoly and people can't leave
Sources: - Microsoft - Google - Others
ironic that an article presumably about avoiding use of cloudflare is apparently unable to handle spikes in traffic caused by posting it on a forum
He's is running GitLab, a rather inefficient webserver.
I would love if there was some content here besides vague posting about Cloudflare bad. Like why? There truly is no thesis to convince me right now.
Also love the irony of getting an HN hug of death w/o Cloudflare
I can't shake the feeling that since its dealing with a huge amount of network traffic and it also strips SSL from every connection before passing it onto origins, they are a very juicy target for a certain three letter agency to place a tap.
The bit I'm less bothered about is the centralising effect it has on the internet.
Nah, they only recently got FedRAMP high. The real traffic still can't use it.
> strips SSL from every connection before passing it onto origins
What do you mean? You definitely can serve with TLS end-to-end with CF, it's called Full (strict) mode, or something like that.
They're still decrypting on their nodes, and then re-encrypting before sending to the origin. There's no getting around the fact they can see the traffic as plain text.
And they issue certs in your name, right?
I got a hearty chuckle out of the redirect linked from the GitLab project info.
[1] http://crimeflare.eu.org/
Your site isn't even loading; it looks like you should use Cloudflare.
[delayed]
it would probably be up, if it was using cloudflare...
cloudflare shill
you attack the messenger
but can you rebuke the message?
Semantics requires a target to rebuke that carries moral agency, so your question is word salad.
And, it's a Kafka trap.
> decloudflare
> visit website
> mission accomplished
I wish life was that simple
GitHub version https://github.com/jiakaiBot/deCloudflare/blob/89983e1501dbb...
Is there a good alt to cloudflare? I don’t want to feed the beast but they are substantially better / cheaper for my use case (domain registrations and tiny websites)
Same, I’d rather not use them but there’s really not much else out there that can offer what Cloudflare does for the price (free). In particular I love the free egress from backblaze.
I’d gladly jump ship if there was a competent competitor, even if paid… within reason.
AWS Cloudfront + S3 is basically free for tiny sites. I have a Terraform module to spin everything up easily.
I've heard good things about https://bunny.net/
HN hug of death?
Could've used some more Cloudflare.
Ironic, given the title of the post.
given i cant read the post... whats the authors objection to cloudflare? the nazi stuff?
just sort of a general complaint about how much the internet relies on cloudflare and what that means. massive point of failure, erratic browser checks & outright blocking, surveillance
You've made a great point.
Just not the point you were trying to make.
I closed the tab after 1 minute of failing to load a readme.md.
I mean I think it speaks loudly that a lot of sites, blogs particularly, wouldn't feel so required to use a service like cloudflare if their viewer visible contents were just statically generated rather than requiring notable amounts of resources to compute each visit.
Incredibly disappointing just how many comments are making fun of the site for not handling the traffic, and saying that "they should have just used Cloudflare". Would Cloudflare caching the site have helped? Maybe/probably, but the user's point (visible on the github mirror https://github.com/jiakaiBot/deCloudflare/blob/89983e1501dbb...) has nothing to do with availability and everything to do with Cloudflare's position as a gatekeeper on the internet.
People who have been around for awhile should probably remember the days when every DDoS site on the internet was hosted behind Cloudflare and CF was notoriously slow about responding to abuse complaints or helping them get to the actual hosts on the other side. Or when Matthew went on a whole thing about how he had a moral obligation to provide services to literal nazis.
> Incredibly disappointing just how many comments are making fun of the site for not handling the traffic
Why? It's a deserved, obvious observation. If you're advocating a position but then demonstrate exactly the thing that counters your position, isn't that a worthwhile point? Of course everyone is going to point it out.
An HN front page simply isn't much traffic at all. It really isn't. The fact that so many sites still fall over is simply crazy in 2026. I don't even know how it's possible this is still such an issue. A Raspberry Pi 5 can host an HNing.
The site finally loaded for me, and seriously publishing content is such a ridiculous pattern. It's actually kind of funny that the whole site is falling over because someone decided to publish an opinion in a README, instead of putting it on an infinitely more appropriate static host (which can be built from that git).
In what way does their lack of traffic resilience demonstrate a counter to their position? Their position is not that load balancers and edge nodes are bad.
If I say I hate oversized trucks because one ran me over, my position is not countered by needing someone to deliver my couch.
> In what way does their lack of traffic resilience demonstrate a counter to their position?
When 99.999% of sites utilize Cloudflare for "traffic resilience", as a caching facade that even happens to be geolocated to clients for even more benefit, falling over on exactly that issue kind of obliterates the sales pitch. Every single reasonable person on the planet sees that.
It looks farcically silly, regardless of whatever points it makes or however much I agree with them (yes, CF centralization is bad, it's a company with a mixed history and a lot of bad, it basically has a monopoly now, etc). And yes, there are other CDNs and load balancers and solutions. But presumably someone pushing a position on this has the problem solved beforehand, no?
As to your poor analogy, it's more akin to saying that you hate trucks while trying to drag a couch seven miles from the store.
Can’t even load it.
from en.action.md:
> Redirect or block "Cloudflare Warp" users from accessing your website. And provide a reason if you can.
come on, really? what does this achieve? only thing i can think of is trying to get the user off of WARP, but i can pretty confidently say that before doing that i'll just not use the website. or if i really care about the content i'll turn it off until i'm done and back on it goes
Tangentially related, the archive.is / archive.today / etc site host used to block anyone using 1.1.1.1 DNS because 1.1.1.1 doesn't send an eDNS subnet to the authoritative DNS server. It accomplishes nothing except annoying actual users.
Why does this repo always seem to have trouble staying online? All the other mirrors are down, and it's not because of this post, because I have been watching other mirrors of this repo disappear over time that aren't even listed there, like https://notabug.org/crimeflare/cloudflare-tor and https://codeberg.org/crimeflare/cloudflare-tor.
What!? Cloudflare is fucking awesome and completely optional.
this is still the best article on cloudflare if anyone wants to see a similar post while the OP site recovers: http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2016/07/14/cloudflare-we-hav...
The irony of this shit ass site loading at a glacial pace lol
Looks like their site is down, but from their github bio:
" Ⓐnti-capitalist Free Software developer, trans rights are human rights, Black Lives Matter, abolish all prisons, 0xACAB "
What did you mean by this?
What does your question imply about your position regarding what he said and what intent can be derived regarding your followup should he entertain your query?