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by peter_d_sherman 1265 days ago
Disclaimer: I am neither pro-Cloudflare nor anti-Cloudflare...

To me, it seems that Cloudflare is just another additional abstraction layer / proxy -- between web sites / web apps / SAAS providers -- and the Internet.

There might be benefits from such an arrangement -- such as Cloudflare's ability to block DDoS attacks...

But there also might be drawbacks from such an arrangement -- such as what do if Cloudflare for whatever reason -- blocks/bans/or otherwise limits you?

Opinion: A good website / web app / SAAS -- would be as distributed as possible -- that is, it would use the Internet natively AND it would Cloudflare AND it would use N Cloudflare competitors/proxy services -- ideally all of them -- at the same time!

In other words -- let the user choose their own route to a provider!

Do you want to use Cloudflare?

Great, we have that!

Do you want to use the Internet natively?

Great, we have that!

Do you want to use a competitor to Cloudflare?

Great -- we have that too!

If it is technically impossible to do that with one domain -- then mirror your site/service/SAAS -- to multiple domains.

Let the user decide what they want...

Incidentally, towards that end, I found the following excellent list on GitHub:

https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443747 -- for related discussion)

It's non-canonical -- but it's probably a step in the right direction...