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by teddyh 1361 days ago
> Honest question, does that matter? Ie if we say that they can do it better than i can, hypothetically that means i'll have more downtime than them - yes?

Yes.

> If that's true for everyone, then the internet will, in aggregate, be down less with CF than if we distributed better.

That depends on what we define as “the internet”. If we use any single service as a point of measure, then “the internet” will have more downtime. But my desire to use the internet is very seldom to use one specific service. Instead, I want to accomplish a specific task, and if my usual service goes down, with any luck they will have a competitor which is still up. This is why I think this alternative is better; it will encourage competitors to exist, which will provide a level of redundancy above the simple network layer.

1 comments

This isn’t really a value proposition to any of the companies that are looking to use cloudflare.

When something big like AWS goes down, it’s just understood by users that stuff is all broken everywhere. It’s not really an opportunity to get more users just because your thing is still up during this huge outage.

On top of that, if the alternative is less reliable than CF, any marginal gain in users during that outage (users that were only interested in your service because it was still up) will again be lost during subsequent outages for the exact same reason.

I was arguing from the point of view of an internet user. From the point of view of an individual service provider, of course it makes sense for them to use CF. But in aggregate, the widespread use of CF makes the internet worse.