I'm opposed to them for purely ideological reasons. Their products are some of the best on the market that I've used at work. I can't really speak to their support because everything I've had to use for work Just Works so I've never had to contact support.
I think it is dangerous to have as much of the web as there already is behind a single entity is all. I do not wish to contribute to the centralization of the web even further by pushing my own sites and projects through Cloudflare. So I make an active effort to avoid using them. The ever increasing centralization of the web should be considered harmful and Cloudflare and AWS already run an absurd portion of the internet and it only seems to be getting worse. To such an extent that US East 1 outages has become a meme.
Yeah they’ve been great. Compared to all 3 other registrars that I’ve used (incl Gandi), Cloudflare has been significantly easier to configure and understand. And it was easy as hell to host my static site through them on their “pages” integration with gitlab. I couldn’t believe how well it worked. Very “just works” for sure.
I don’t love how they’re a single point of failure for much of the internet, or the amount of power that gives them. But from a user’s perspective their service has been fantastic, especially for how little I’ve paid them.
What's their billing model? Can you choose "if I stuff up, my things go offline" (NearlyFreeSpeech) or is the only option "if I stuff up, I get an enormous credit card bill" (AWS)?
For business use I don't care so much about this. But for personal stuff I just can't accept unlimited liability. I would even be willing to pay a bit more for the safety.
So... I suppose my question is: what's a good option for folks who are worried about bill shock?
The only reason I chose them instead of AWS is bill shock. I don't run up high enough of requests to go past the free tier though so honestly... I have no idea what it's like to run a "successful" system with millions of requests a day.
But their pricing (10 million / month, +$0.50/million) is much clearer to me than the many many pages of confusing jargon on AWS, which is why I went for CF.
I've seen some horror stories, but it's been great so far. Honestly, I just don't know... but that's probably true for any host like this? (I have no idea how to run my own server, so I'm completely dependent on hosts like CF or Fly)
That sounds better to me than AWS billing, but for personal stuff I'd still prefer to pre-pay and then get cut off if I run out of money in my cloud provider account.
If the provider is worried about incurring costs that they then can't recover, then they could require me to have, e.g., a minimum $10 balance, and all but the simplest of things shut down if I dip below that. Then the remaining ~$10 would be used to pay for cost of storage/bookkeeping, and then if _that_ runs out, they delete all my stuff.
I'm happy to pay. I just can't tolerate much personal risk as an individual with a family.
Could you elaborate on Cloudflare's support? My understanding was that unless you're on a plan ($20+/mo per site) you don't get access to support at all, just community/forums.
I only pay them for domains, and they have my CC for Cloudflare Workers (but I've never paid them).
I ran into a few issues with their platform, once with R2 when it first rolled out, and a couple of times with domains, and once with caching not clearing.
I think I submitted my request through some form (this is a while ago, hazy) and someone always got back to me within 4 hours. I think they're supposed to get back at least 24-48 hours.
Mileage may vary, and this was a while ago, so maybe things have changed now.
It seems common sense to prefer providers who are reasonably agnostic to who they provide services to. I would not use a water company that refuses to provide water to political enemies, because what if one day you become distasteful to them and they turn your water off without warning? Nor would I use a service where if someone accuses me without evidence of something distasteful, the company’s response is to immediately suspend services to you before they fully understand the story (e.g. the recent Amazon smart home “racist” incident where nothing racist actually took place but a man lost access to all his devices and locks).
I want services provided by full-time service providers, not service providers who moonlight as moral arbiters.
I use cloudflare because they stand up to the screeching mob and defend free speech. I moved all of my domains there from namecheap when namecheap took a particularly deplorable and irritatingly loud position with respect to Ukraine.
Free speech includes fascists, crims whatever that is, and whoever else you may or may not find detestable. I'd like them better if they still hosted The Daily Stormer, but I can't think of any other giant company taking consistent stands against the hegemony of the radical left.
And in case you consider my opinion a no-no as your response indicates to me, allow me to dig in a little deeper. I don't mind people I disagree with as long as they are mostly respectful in their disagreement. I don't think fascists or nazis or the KKK or whatever other boogeyman you can come up with make a very good case for their beliefs and they pose no real danger. I welcome their free speech as an important component of diverse opinion and expression in the public square. And I don't judge them wholesale for holding opinions I disagree with either.
> I use cloudflare because they stand up to the screeching mob and defend free speech.
Ah, your previous short quip made you look like you were agreeing not only with the part where they keep "crims and fascists" online, but also the part where they kick sex workers out — assuming they actually do, but since you neither denounced, denied, or even questioned it, it looked like you agreed with both the facts and morals of it.
You’d understand that this didn’t exactly makes you look like a neutral free speech defender.
> the hegemony of the radical left.
It’s hardly radical if it doesn’t question capitalism, and last time I checked anti-capitalism was far from hegemonic. I’m not sure what you actually mean by "radical left", but I’m guessing they tend to think more about systems than individuals, which may be alien enough to look radical from the other side.
> I don't think fascists or nazis or the KKK or whatever other boogeyman you can come up with make a very good case for their beliefs and they pose no real danger.
They don’t have to make a good case unfortunately. Like abusive cults, they can instead enrol vulnerable or disenfranchised people, ease them in, and eventually cut them off their previous entourage, to the point where you can no longer reason with them.
That, and the pipeline of influencers that makes the next small step down the far right path look quite okay, with no clear limit between a couple harmless edgy jokes and full blown literal Nazism (The Boys illustrates that radicalisation process fairly well).
I'm very happy with Namecheap. The prices are very reasonable (though I confess I have never really shopped around), the UI is functional and largely gets out of your way and lets you do what you want.
My father two years ago had a heart attack and a stroke, I found him and yelled for my mom and sister, then started CPR until the paramedics came. He survived and is doing very well, but it's crazy to think there was only a 10%~ish chance of it working.
So I once made a script with python and selenium to make fake petitions to bring back Wendy's spicy chicken nuggets. It stopped around 9,000 when the script crashed after awhile... I think they did bring it back though so I feel like I was responsible.
Wish I could have played it, bought it for PS5 and installed it, before I could even play one match I was falsely perma banned for cheating? A ton of other people have had this happened and Activision won't say anything about it... got a refund though.
Yeah I'm seeing this happen on Instagram also, which I used to actually use but every 3rd post is an ad followed by a sponsored post and some account I don't follow.
I keep my original Xbox just to play JSRF still, but I would like to play it in HD someday. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is looking real good though as a spiritual successor if you haven't seen it yet.
Sold on the Xbox a long time ago - back when I regularly moved from flat to flat it became a hassle to take all that stuff with me! I’ll check out Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, thanks for the tip!
Also have an original Xbox but it’s a v1.6, in which MS managed to break JSRF and a few other games due to using a different video encoding chip. Very annoying (though on the plus side, no leaking clock capacitor). Thanks for pointing out BRC.
