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Ask HN: Alternatives to Cloudflare?

18 points by mproud ↗ HN
Everyone I know seems to be in love with Cloudflare, and then sporadically, we have issues like Cloudbleed, reported data leaks, and severe outages that simply take your site down just for using them.

Is CF overrated, or worth the occasional blips? What can I do to minimize downtime? Are there good alternatives?

25 comments

[ 7.1 ms ] story [ 72.9 ms ] thread
arkitaip
For what, DNS, Firewall, CDN?
mproud
Yes? What’s important?

I run my own server on a VPS, and serve no more than 50 concurrent users.

LinuxBender
Depending on how your applications are coded/configured, a CDN should not be required for 50 concurrent users unless your site attracts targeted DDoS attacks. For what it's worth most VPS providers have options to front-end your site with a load balancer and/or simple DDoS protection.

Do you have a specific use case that requires a CDN? spambots brute forcing your forms?

mproud
I don’t think so? It just seems like all the kids are using CDNs these days, and some of my developer friends who have a tendency to over-architect things seem to swear by them.
LinuxBender
some of my developer friends who have a tendency to over-architect things

I have witnessed this as well. People do a thing however may not realize why they are doing it. It reminds me of the five monkeys, the ladder, the bananas and the sprayer. [1]

I suppose that only you would know if your site really needs a CDN by looking at load/network statistics. Anecdotally the only times I have needed one was when I posted anything controversial. Even then a VPS can usually withstand some abuse but some of the admins can be quick to disable a node if they see sustained abuse. Some VPS providers are easier to manipulate into cancelling a VM without proper investigation. It also depends on how experienced the person responding to their abuse@ complaints is that day.

For what it's worth, HN is not using a CDN and is just running on one server.

[1] - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-ex...

ratg13
You still aren't explaining what you use cloudflare for or why you included them in your architecture.
mproud
I don’t use Cloudflare or any CDN right now. I feel like I’m not a likely target for DDoS attacks.

I guess my secondary question is, why do many people running pretty small websites use and swear by them? I’m just trying to understand how necessary CDNs are, and is CF the CDN to use?

Komodai
Personally I have 75 domains that use Cloudflare (not very normal but yeah)

Most of which are just small personal sites

I use Cloudflare to: 1. Give me easy SSL on all of the sites ("flexible", so not 'proper' ssl) 2. Hide my origin IPs 3. Easy compression, minification, caching, etc. 4. Host some sites on Cloudflare Pages

CDNs certainly aren't necessary for small websites but I'd say Cloudflare is the one to use if you want one, but also want to avoid spending money.

If you feel like you don't need or want one, honestly just don't bother with it.

mproud
Thanks for the insight!
DrWhax
maybe do a double cdn, both cloudflare and fastly. if one goes down the other is up.
nik736
What exactly are you using Cloudflare for?
mproud
I’m not, I don’t have a CDN, but it seems like all the kids have them now, so maybe I should be? But events like this make me wonder if it’s just adding more complication.
s1k3s
That's a really weird thought process lol
mproud
I did a poor job of saying, other devs I know have CDNs, I don’t. Am I missing out on something?
giaour
Cloudflare combines a few tools that you would need to cobble together yourself if you wanted the same experience from another provider. E.g., if you wanted to use AWS services instead, you could stack WAF, CloudFront, and Route53 to get a firewall, CDN, and DNS provider. If you only need some of the Cloudflare stack (maybe you need a good firewall but don't care about a CDN?), then you can only use the pieces you need.
devonbleak
They all have issues once in a while. None is really head and shoulders above the rest. We've run up to 5 CDNs at once for very large events and still had issues.

Taking a pragmatic approach the questions you need to be asking are more like "what is my actual uptime target?", "what benefit is this piece of my architecture adding?" and "is the cost (in terms of complexity if not actual money) worth it to diversify?"

mproud
You raise some good points.

And perhaps I’m overreacting. (Though the thought of my website being beholden to another company and being helpless isn’t satisfying.)

I currently don’t run a CDN at all. The server I have is for a side project that is for users’ creative purposes than important business needs, so the uptime isn’t absolutely critical.

Canada
Try fastly
mproud
Yeah? Do you have personal experience?
nonameiguess
I'm not sure exactly what the reason is for the equivalent market caps, but Akamai still has about 4x the revenue, net income, employee head count, so it seems like a perfectly viable CDN. I don't personally have a choice with what I'm working on. I work for the Air Force, and they use Akamai.

Not advocating one or the other. Everything has outages. But Cloudflare is clearly not the only option out there. I think they just seem like it in solo dev/startup spaces like this because they have historically had the most extensive free tier in their industry sector.

jmartens
Cloudflare is wildly reliable. Today's issue is a rare, but normal exception. I doubt you'll find anything more reliable.
nathants
other providers with an offering like workers+r2 would be great for the market.
night-rider
There’s a few other WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) knocking around. Russia Today uses DDOSGuard due to the Ukraine crisis. If it’s a CDN you want there are plenty of alternatives, e.g Fastly, Bunny, Cloudfront, Stackpath etc
Havoc
For simpler cdn stuff I do like bunny. Nowhere near cf on feature set but it does what it says on tin