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?
Can you expand on it? How do websites block vpn? Do they just block all the other countries? Why would you want to visit such websites?
Many people using a VPN have the same IP address, and cloudflare and others can track that behavior and block those IP addresses. Different sites do it for different reasons, some do it for a little extra security because attacks often come routed through a VPN, some do it to block country specific content like Netflix does.