Both Lemmy.world and my server rely upon Cloudflare for SSL, DDOS protection, CDN services, etc. I use it to provide me with a Cloudflare tunnel to get around not being able to forward ports.
Outages have put this dependance to question, and the same with recent news about the US government obtaining data through subpoenas. It’s a free service that takes care of many of the difficulties when it comes to hosting your service online, but everyone knows that free is not free.
What do you all think about Cloudflare?


Cloudflare is one of the secret ruling parties of the internet.
I don’t understand why so many Americans like to use it, even the ones who tend to think liberal and go for self hosting.
What are the alternatives?
And a VPS and any number of tunneling systems for the remote reverse proxy.
Rathole is my goto. But SSH forwarding, wireguard… There’s plenty, even ones that will entirely manage the reverse proxy on the VPS.
Letsencrypt for SSL, fail2ban for ddos protection, literally just a disk for cdn.
F2B for ddos protection?! You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing. At all.
Does fail2ban actually help?
In a strong enough DDOS, you need someone before you to stop the traffic, at which point you either have a good provider, or have to submit to someone bigger than you.
This is probably why so many people use cloudflare. Similarly to discord, their serivices can be found on several different platforms but they are the only ones who offer all of them for free.
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