Cloudflare is a large enterprise web service provider, which offers services such as DNS, DDoS protection, content delivery, reverse proxying, WAF, and many other things that I am not quite qualified to talk about. In short, though, Cloudflare runs the internet. So much so, in fact, that there has been three major outages in 2024 alone, affecting up to hundreds of thousands of customers each time.

This isn’t isolated to 2024, though. Almost every year, something happens with Cloudflare, rendering significant portions of the Internet entirely unusable. And yet, despite this, basically every company with a website uses them. So my question is, why?

Why does half the Internet depend on a company that consistently leaves them hanging?

This is more of a placeholder post than anything. I don’t have any legitimate gripes with Cloudflare, other than their high prices and large market share, which kinda pushes out any competition. I would appreciate a lower tier subscription, or a one-time-payment, strictly for proxying Minecraft, SSH, and other common protocols that might get DDoSed. As a hobbyist, my services don’t make me any money. So spending very real funds on DDoS protection is not an especially enticing idea to me, at least while the prices are as high as they are.

I do, however, appreciate that they’re able to provide free proxying and DNS for every customer. It’s made my infrastructure significantly easier to extend and maintain.