[breakingcups]

Can I ask you. For all intents and purposes, what is the difference between Cloudflare and a regular host except an expiry time on the content they host?

Cloudflare: - Makes a website available through their IP addresses - Resolves a site's DNS - Stores the content of the website on their servers, to serve to clients. The fact that there's an expiration on that content is of no consequence.

The fact that the final source-of-truth lies offsite makes no difference. If I rent a regular, run of the mill server and have it proxy all requests to a different server, does that suddenly make the first host bulletproof to any and all scrutiny?

Cloudflare likes to pretend they are a neutral entity, impartial, just like regular Internet Providers but they are decidedly not. They are being paid by their customers to store and serve their content from their servers and to perform traffic filtering.