I love cloudflare, seriously. Not sure what it is about the brand, but their products feel delightful, they feel like an honest business, they have great free tiers, their tech is “cool” and they seem to innovate a lot (I.e the recent AI blocking program etc). Just moved all my domains over from Whois.com (who on the other hand seem sneaky, don’t have auto renewals and slam you with an 80$ restoration fine for domains you forget to renew, and charge extra for basic security that should be free). Couldn’t be happier and wish cloudflare all the best!!
The first point is data for a reason - the amount of traffic they see enables them to train models with capabilities beyond what the competition can do.
With free tiers it's harder for competition to break into market as they'll need to convince customers that they are getting more for the money than Cloudflare offers for free. Then see point one about data.
Sadly, this creates a choke point for the internet. When Cloudflare is down, "nothing" works. This used to be a problem, but if you're big enough, it's treated like a weather event. See AWS us-east-1 outages, I doubt anyone was compensated for the outage.
So yeah, Cloudflare has a great position.
What worries me is that AI data endpoint they're crafting. I don't think it's good idea that anyone has a hold of that much data.
Also, the threat to privacy. If I turn on iCloud Private Relay I get bombarded with CloudFlare captchas. It’s so annoying I sometimes turn it off just for that reason.
Having some all knowing entity running the internet has a lot of downsides.
Just like Vercel and Render, thus many folks will get started there instead of having to deal with giving a credit card to the usual hyperscalers.
We have done prototypes of distributed systems based on SaaS products with such kind of accounts, and when proven to work, it is much easier to get the buy-in for the credit card, than starting with asking for money first delivery later.
Most people have forgotten just how cheap bandwidth is. Too much AWS lead cloud pricing propaganda brain rot. Without the high prices, your big clouds won't be able to afford 6-7 figs of engineering salary.
If you have questions about bandwidth pricing, just go to lookup the video piracy streaming sites that's almost completely powered by ads. They are not YouTube scale and most barely last a year before they have to come back with a new domain (because of deplatforming, not because they ran out of money).
A terabyte of bandwidth is maybe worth a dollar at scale (amortized globally, some places are more expensive than others i.e. Africa, certain parts of Asia). Yet the managed clouds gouge customers like there's no tomorrow.
That’s because with managed clouds, you’re not actually paying for egress traffic when you pay for egress traffic. You’re paying your fair share of the incredibly expensive massive, distributed, low-latency, high-bandwidth, reliable network infrastructure used to glue the entire cloud together. The thing that can withstand massive DDoSes without breaking a sweat. It’s textbook cross subsidization.
CloudFlare doesn’t operate a massive cloud infrastructure so they don’t have the same cost structure.
Unfortunately the cloud providers don’t make this clear to the world, leading to a lot of grumbling from people who think bandwidth should be charged on a pure cost-plus model.
CloudFlare and the hyperscalers are the reason bandwidth costs have dropped so dramatically.
I remember hearing from a CloudFlare founder not long after they raised an early round how they had to go around negotiating large peering contracts to make enough bandwidth available for their customers. And that Australia was by far the most expensive region because they had very few undersea cables and only a single company providing that access.
End users present like you can always drive up to the gas station and there will always be plenty to fill up your 10-20 gallon tank. But behind the scenes are massive distribution networks and a market making mechanism.
Also I don't buy your premise that illegal video streaming only make money on ads. I'm under the impression they also sell access to a lot of viewer's machines to companies that want to crawl the web and appear to come from lots of residential ISP nodes.
Most hosting (eg AWS) requires you to say who you are, provide a lot of ID. I think some don’t at first (eg Azure, Hetzner) but eventually you need to pay via a credit card, include your actual name etc.
With Cloudflare, you literally only need an email address. It continues to be free.
The second best is Hostinger, where you can pay with crypto.
Github pages is great too, but you don’t really get all the power to customize your own website.
Cloudflare is exclusively what I use for any infra work I do (and I do a lot for various projects and startups of my own/others I advice). If something doesn’t fit cloudflare primitives, I try to rethink my design before reaching for gcloud etc.
They even do docker containers now which is great but durable objects and workers are game changer for me.
The easy nextjs deployment is also my go-to now that vercel isn’t my preferred vendor.
I love cloudflare, seriously. Not sure what it is about the brand, but their products feel delightful, they feel like an honest business, they have great free tiers, their tech is “cool” and they seem to innovate a lot (I.e the recent AI blocking program etc). Just moved all my domains over from Whois.com (who on the other hand seem sneaky, don’t have auto renewals and slam you with an 80$ restoration fine for domains you forget to renew, and charge extra for basic security that should be free). Couldn’t be happier and wish cloudflare all the best!!
Look, this is a great business strategy.
The first point is data for a reason - the amount of traffic they see enables them to train models with capabilities beyond what the competition can do.
With free tiers it's harder for competition to break into market as they'll need to convince customers that they are getting more for the money than Cloudflare offers for free. Then see point one about data.
Sadly, this creates a choke point for the internet. When Cloudflare is down, "nothing" works. This used to be a problem, but if you're big enough, it's treated like a weather event. See AWS us-east-1 outages, I doubt anyone was compensated for the outage.
So yeah, Cloudflare has a great position.
What worries me is that AI data endpoint they're crafting. I don't think it's good idea that anyone has a hold of that much data.
Also, the threat to privacy. If I turn on iCloud Private Relay I get bombarded with CloudFlare captchas. It’s so annoying I sometimes turn it off just for that reason.
Having some all knowing entity running the internet has a lot of downsides.
Just like Vercel and Render, thus many folks will get started there instead of having to deal with giving a credit card to the usual hyperscalers.
We have done prototypes of distributed systems based on SaaS products with such kind of accounts, and when proven to work, it is much easier to get the buy-in for the credit card, than starting with asking for money first delivery later.
Could we add (2016) to be title?
Most people have forgotten just how cheap bandwidth is. Too much AWS lead cloud pricing propaganda brain rot. Without the high prices, your big clouds won't be able to afford 6-7 figs of engineering salary.
If you have questions about bandwidth pricing, just go to lookup the video piracy streaming sites that's almost completely powered by ads. They are not YouTube scale and most barely last a year before they have to come back with a new domain (because of deplatforming, not because they ran out of money).
A terabyte of bandwidth is maybe worth a dollar at scale (amortized globally, some places are more expensive than others i.e. Africa, certain parts of Asia). Yet the managed clouds gouge customers like there's no tomorrow.
That’s because with managed clouds, you’re not actually paying for egress traffic when you pay for egress traffic. You’re paying your fair share of the incredibly expensive massive, distributed, low-latency, high-bandwidth, reliable network infrastructure used to glue the entire cloud together. The thing that can withstand massive DDoSes without breaking a sweat. It’s textbook cross subsidization.
CloudFlare doesn’t operate a massive cloud infrastructure so they don’t have the same cost structure.
Unfortunately the cloud providers don’t make this clear to the world, leading to a lot of grumbling from people who think bandwidth should be charged on a pure cost-plus model.
CloudFlare and the hyperscalers are the reason bandwidth costs have dropped so dramatically.
I remember hearing from a CloudFlare founder not long after they raised an early round how they had to go around negotiating large peering contracts to make enough bandwidth available for their customers. And that Australia was by far the most expensive region because they had very few undersea cables and only a single company providing that access.
End users present like you can always drive up to the gas station and there will always be plenty to fill up your 10-20 gallon tank. But behind the scenes are massive distribution networks and a market making mechanism.
Also I don't buy your premise that illegal video streaming only make money on ads. I'm under the impression they also sell access to a lot of viewer's machines to companies that want to crawl the web and appear to come from lots of residential ISP nodes.
> just go to lookup the video piracy streaming sites that's almost completely powered by ads
They are often down, slow, or congested.
Impressive for their low revenue, but I'm not sure how relevant to cloud customers that want better quality than that.
And yes, I know cloud services are often down, slow, or unavailable, but it's a matter of degrees.
They're down, slow, and congested, but spend 1/10000th that companies shackled by big cloud do.
Are you saying that legitimate businesses cannot find something better for 1/100th the price instead?
For the same reason companies are doing backends in JavaScript and Python instead of something more fit to purpose.
The cheaper pool of work force to fish from, instead of folks with more specialised knowledge.
> In 2015, our employment acceptance rate was 1.6% ...
What does that mean? That 1.6% of their offers were accepted by candidates? If so doesn't seem very high...
From the context, my interpretation is that he is saying “We make job offers to 1.6% of applicants”.
It isn’t just free. It’s effectively anonymous.
Most hosting (eg AWS) requires you to say who you are, provide a lot of ID. I think some don’t at first (eg Azure, Hetzner) but eventually you need to pay via a credit card, include your actual name etc.
With Cloudflare, you literally only need an email address. It continues to be free.
The second best is Hostinger, where you can pay with crypto.
Github pages is great too, but you don’t really get all the power to customize your own website.
Cloudflare is exclusively what I use for any infra work I do (and I do a lot for various projects and startups of my own/others I advice). If something doesn’t fit cloudflare primitives, I try to rethink my design before reaching for gcloud etc.
They even do docker containers now which is great but durable objects and workers are game changer for me.
The easy nextjs deployment is also my go-to now that vercel isn’t my preferred vendor.