I mean other than making surfing the web slow as molasses.
You must log in or register to comment.
Cloudflare is a content distribution network (CDN). I’ve worked for a few for a long time.
When you run a website, you’re responsible for serving up web responses to every web request. Depending on the level of traffic that your website receives, that can involve paying for a lot of hardware infrastructure, plus a ton of money in hosting and transit costs.
So instead of buying a bunch of server hardware outright or paying long-term leases for cloud-based resources, you can use a CDN. CDNs have tons and tons of servers in data centers all over the world, all designed to hold onto a cached copy of your website data and serve it to customers. Because CDNs operate at a global scale, they get better deals on transit costs, plus traffic can be served from machines closer to where the end-user request is coming from so requests get fulfilled faster and with fewer errors.
There are a bunch of different CDNs out there: Cloudflare, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, plus plenty that specialize regionally (which can be important in network-constrained regions and restrictive countries).
Cloudflare tends to be a popular option due to speed, ease of integration and pricing.
The web acceleration component of the CDN business model isn’t in a growth state right now. The web is entirely flooded with machine agents and bots generating traffic that website owners have to pay for, so there’s big business in putting up roadblocks to prevent bot traffic (like Cloudflare’s annoying ‘are you a human?’ checks).
It also helps avoid distributed denial of service attacks.
Internet Protocol was designed around the idea that anyone should be able to send traffic to anyone, and that that party doesn’t really have control over traffic reaching them until it gets to them, where they can just drop it if they aren’t interested in it. That has some benefits.
However, this meant that if someone could round up enough computers with attached bandwidth, they could send traffic to one computer, and flood its network connection. This degrades its ability to talk to the rest of the Internet.
Some people decided to start going out and—often by compromising computers in one way or another—adding them to a “botnet”, which they could then use to flood servers on the Internet, making various services, mostly websites, slow or inaccessible. This is known as a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). Some groups decided to try demanding ransoms from various websites.
If you try to flood a host behind CloudFlare, though, all you flood is CloudFlare, which is very large and has a lot of bandwidth and is going to be very difficult to bring down. You can try to reach the host behind CloudFlare via various methods—in fact, I posted something just the other day that specifically dealt with reaching that host, for a latency measurement—but if you’re trying to flood them that way, then CloudFlare is in a good position to detect and block your traffic at their computers. And, I’d expect that CloudFlare will also have a lot of expertise to try to counter very, very large-scale flooding before it even reaches their systems by communicating with major telcos.
I think that what we probably need is potentially for some kind of revision to IP that permits for hosts to have a way to blacklist or whitelist traffic and push those upstream, unless we want to have something like most Internet traffic being routed through CloudFlare or similar to solve the distributed denial of service problem. We…could do that, have the Internet basically be CloudFlare, Inc, but that’s not really what the designers of Internet Protocol intended, and I think that there are some good reasons not to go that route.
So basically what I gather from this is CDNs are, once again, something else that would be better for me if I just did it myself. Like most things in the tech world these days, doing it yourself is the cheapest and most freeing option. Assuming you have an old but still capable PC around, that is.
If you’re only running a small website with little traffic, yeah absolutely.
But if your traffic grows, your costs increase rapidly to buy hardware to handle it, or you deal with website crashes.
It’s also a lot harder to DDoS a website that uses a CDN than one that entirely self hosts.
Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s just a small passion project for now. Although I wouldn’t mind having to solve the problem of higher traffic haha
Before I answer your question, please verify you are not a robot. Click >> << Here.
Every time I click, your post disappears and I have to reopen it.
Thank you for verifying that you are, in fact, a robot. 🤖
It exists to identify if whoever is visiting is a human or a bot.
Why?
Because if it’s a bit it’s likely automated and there’s a variety of reasons to not want automated requests to come through. Some of them are:
- because lots of “hackers” try to hack systems by automatically trying to find security vulnerabilities in a server, service etc.
- because automated requests can be done faster, so they can happen more commonly, and they use resources, and if there’s too many this genuinely affects server performance budget
- bunch more reasons
To add to this: the issue with it comes with the implementation which, without explinaiton, requires JavaScript, web assembly, etc.
And for whatever fucking reason insists on loading several megabytes of data before even deciding whether to make you complete the challenge. This is why it’s so slow.
they got a lot of products.
most common you see is the anti-bot/anti-ai/human-fingerprinter that decides that if you can’t be fingerprinted, you must be a bot.
then there’s the cdn. the quickie-storage-like-cache stuff.
then there’s the dns.
i think there’s more like networking and cloud cpu stuff. those are rarely flexed.
They also do reverse tunnels, which are handy if you want to expose your website, web app, API ect to the internet without exposing your whole ass network to the internet and deal with the security implications of that, or if you don’t have/don’t want to have full control over the upstream local network (eg you want to stand up a web app on a weird port inside a corporate network where the ICT team won’t let you do port forwarding on the router firewall) including not having a static public IP address. It also handles SSL so you don’t need to install your own certs.
This lets me run websites and an API from servers in my house, without needing to do any firewall stuff on my router or having a static IP issued by my ISP. I only need one tunnel to each server, and each tunnel can handle routing all of the sites on a server to their various domain names.
oh yup! the reverse tunnels they offer are great!
It’s a service you can sign up for where you can watch menu items move around randomly in the sidebar navigation. It’s really neat and it does some other cool stuff too.
Holy shit so I’m not the only one. They seem to change their UI menu names more than I change my pants.
This! Every other werk they move my tunnels to a new random spot or menu. What’s up with that?
it and its ilk came up to mitigate ddos attacks. At least it seems that way to me. They were pretty common and crippling in the early teens. I think its because of things like this that you no longer hear about them much.
Annoy the piss out of us to verify and break down just to piss us off even more when we’re trying to get somewhere.
CF hides the IP of your Server and other stuff
So don’t use it
Pretty fare clouds
Some deep state shit made to deanonymize the whole net via MITM attack, why do you think they offer free service?
