I am a plebe who doesn’t understand these things but what exactly does cloudflare do? I see it popping up more and more often redirecting before visiting a site. I assume that this has something to do with bot traffic? It seems like every mention of cloudflare is about how it ruined someone’s day.
Hard to answer your question because it’s a mixed bag.
As tech gets cheaper, it gets easier and easier to do malicious things.
On the small scale: I used to host my tech blog on a rinky dink raspberry pi.
I was getting hundreds of funny bot visits a hour, as they try to pen test and find any vulnerabilities. And that was after I set up some tools to block weird IPs. Two years ago, I was getting thousands, and the numbers kept growing. It didn’t hit a point where user experience was taking a hit, but at some point it will.
I could get a beefier system (more expensive), or I can just sign up for cloudflare. And now the management of that layer is handled by Cloudflare, so I can focus on coding.
Now to talk About the enterprise level: same thing but hundreds of times more. We were actually getting DDos. We originally didn’t want to use Cloudflare, and instead use in-house solutions. But after a hefty trial and seeing our AWS expenses skyrocket, we swapped to Cloudflare.
Signed up, swapped over to Cloudflare, and instant uptake. We are also paying a fraction compared to our in-house solution.
It sounds like a freaking ad for cloudflare.
But one thing I don’t like is Cloudflare can easily monopolize the internet. As we all switch, Cloudflare now has a lot of power to tell sites to fuck off if they don’t like their content. Cloudflare hasn’t yet. They keep up White Power websites and racist shit. But they have taken down calls of violence and online gambling.
If you have your day ruined by Cloudflare, I’m going to either assume you run a bot network, you’re trying to do something incorrectly, or you are part of the dark web.