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 just your average, often free, TLS-terminating proxy everyone uses and definitely NOT a NSA operation for being able to read and control all internet traffic.
You should definitely use it, preferably with AWS or Azure (or both!) as the underlying server.
Also, pick US-East1 so you are down when everybody else is.
You laugh about US-East-1, but honestly, if you’re not geographically fault tolerant, your users are less likely to come for your head if all their other services are down too.
I do wonder if everyone would be so comfortable with Cloudflare if they were a Russian or Chinese operation.
Wouldn’t be surprised to find CF were also controlling some of the biggest DDOS botnets to remind people what happens when you don’t let the Americans see all your traffic…
I’d never use something like CF to handle sensitive information. Anything going over that tunnels and puppies and sunshine. I’m also relatively less worried about Russia and China collecting my data and locking me up over it because I don’t live there.