[QuentinM]

faeyanpiraat's point, but also, despite this failure, let's not dismiss the fact that Cloudflare brings unique (i.e. difficult to replicate) features (hence their success) a/ ability to identify threats at a global scale using a massive aggregation of data b/ ability to stop malicious actors close to their sources thanks to their large grid of POPs & their use of the anycast routing model.

Sure, anyone can scale my localized infrastructure for the traffic of 100,000 IP Cameras. Can anyone do it for 10,000,000 pwnd devices? Sure, but it'll likely start not being so practical without multiple POPs. Do I want to hire a dozen network & threat detection engineers to build/maintain that, complicate my processes, and pay for the infrastructure moving forward for a once-in-a-year event? Not really, no.

The way I see it, Cloudflare acts just like an insurance policy. Pay for a fraction of the actual cost, get your back covered, and profit from the expertise when it hits the fan.

[dannyw]

I used to run a cryptocurrency website. It would get 50-100gbit+ DDoS attacks on a daily basis. This was a number of years ago.

DDoS mitigation providers wanted absolutely absurd amounts. Cloudflare took me on for $200 a month (I had confirmed beforehand). Mitigated all the attacks. All tickets were responded within minutes by network engineers working to mitigate the attack.