HN Explorer

Ask HN: Who powers the web?

2 points by AdmiralAsshat ↗ HN
With the Cloudflare and Amazon incidents over the past week and the huge impact they had on the web, it seems clear that a handful of service providers essentially control or power the internet as we know it.

I am curious if anyone has some stats as to what percentage of the web is behind Cloudflare or powered by AWS, etc.

2 comments

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[dead] nrdwavexe
They didn't have a huge impact. They had an impact on Cloudflare and Amazon customers, and HN readers are more likely to use these services and get upset when they don't work and complain about it. On hacker news.

AWS is mostly corporate infrastructure. Cloudflare is a reverse proxy for people who don't want to learn networking. You can actually compete with these companies. They don't like it and it drives up salaries and drives down prices, but if you have someone with deep pockets behind you then you too can "power the web". Of course at a basic level the electric power company powers the web.

Actually, if you do wind up running a data center, you will find that they are power-limited. That is, the scarce resource you run up against isn't hardware cost but the amount of electric power you can get into your location, used for running servers and cooling.