[donmcronald]

The argument about Cloudflare being the man-in-the-middle has always confused me. Yeah, it makes sense if you're big enough to run your own data centers, but for most smaller sites you're trusting someone to host it, so how is Cloudflare any different than some other random provider?

I'd still like to know what happened with that domain that got put into pendingDelete with a false positive a couple weeks ago, but, besides that, I'm very bullish on Cloudflare. I think there's a massive amount of opportunity to capture underserved markets in tech right now due to subscription fatigue and increasing prices. More reasonable pricing could do well in the low end of some markets and having a platform like Cloudflare that can scale to $0 makes it much more practical to start thinking about building for some of those markets.

Cloudflare solves a real problem that's impossible for anyone small to solve for themselves and getting to ignore all of that complexity makes it practical for people to build things they couldn't even consider before. Cloudflare is adding value way beyond any risk they're creating by acting as a proxy.

[Ancapistani]

> but for most smaller sites you're trusting someone to host it, so how is Cloudflare any different than some other random provider

Easy - you’re trusting someone, true, but it’s likely not the same person that someone else is trusting.

With Cloudflare, pretty much everyone is trusting the same party. Compromising Cloudflare compromises everyone.

[DoctorOW]

> Easy - you’re trusting someone, true, but it’s likely not the same person that someone else is trusting.

I dunno if that's true. I mean I can name 5 companies and generally speaking narrow it down to the owner of the hardware (or the owner of the owner of the hardware) or at the very least a company with enough resources that if they want your content they can take it.

[twelve40]

So the real problem seems to be that they are a monopoly? But how is that their fault? they invented the low-cost CDN market, before them we mostly just had Akamai that hosted Wimbledon-size websites and streams for $$$$.

PS. also unclear where else I can get similar services - no affiliation with them, just to run a small website.