I'm opposed to them for purely ideological reasons. Their products are some of the best on the market that I've used at work. I can't really speak to their support because everything I've had to use for work Just Works so I've never had to contact support.
I think it is dangerous to have as much of the web as there already is behind a single entity is all. I do not wish to contribute to the centralization of the web even further by pushing my own sites and projects through Cloudflare. So I make an active effort to avoid using them. The ever increasing centralization of the web should be considered harmful and Cloudflare and AWS already run an absurd portion of the internet and it only seems to be getting worse. To such an extent that US East 1 outages has become a meme.
Yeah they’ve been great. Compared to all 3 other registrars that I’ve used (incl Gandi), Cloudflare has been significantly easier to configure and understand. And it was easy as hell to host my static site through them on their “pages” integration with gitlab. I couldn’t believe how well it worked. Very “just works” for sure.
I don’t love how they’re a single point of failure for much of the internet, or the amount of power that gives them. But from a user’s perspective their service has been fantastic, especially for how little I’ve paid them.
What's their billing model? Can you choose "if I stuff up, my things go offline" (NearlyFreeSpeech) or is the only option "if I stuff up, I get an enormous credit card bill" (AWS)?
For business use I don't care so much about this. But for personal stuff I just can't accept unlimited liability. I would even be willing to pay a bit more for the safety.
So... I suppose my question is: what's a good option for folks who are worried about bill shock?
The only reason I chose them instead of AWS is bill shock. I don't run up high enough of requests to go past the free tier though so honestly... I have no idea what it's like to run a "successful" system with millions of requests a day.
But their pricing (10 million / month, +$0.50/million) is much clearer to me than the many many pages of confusing jargon on AWS, which is why I went for CF.
I've seen some horror stories, but it's been great so far. Honestly, I just don't know... but that's probably true for any host like this? (I have no idea how to run my own server, so I'm completely dependent on hosts like CF or Fly)
That sounds better to me than AWS billing, but for personal stuff I'd still prefer to pre-pay and then get cut off if I run out of money in my cloud provider account.
If the provider is worried about incurring costs that they then can't recover, then they could require me to have, e.g., a minimum $10 balance, and all but the simplest of things shut down if I dip below that. Then the remaining ~$10 would be used to pay for cost of storage/bookkeeping, and then if _that_ runs out, they delete all my stuff.
I'm happy to pay. I just can't tolerate much personal risk as an individual with a family.
Could you elaborate on Cloudflare's support? My understanding was that unless you're on a plan ($20+/mo per site) you don't get access to support at all, just community/forums.
I only pay them for domains, and they have my CC for Cloudflare Workers (but I've never paid them).
I ran into a few issues with their platform, once with R2 when it first rolled out, and a couple of times with domains, and once with caching not clearing.
I think I submitted my request through some form (this is a while ago, hazy) and someone always got back to me within 4 hours. I think they're supposed to get back at least 24-48 hours.
Mileage may vary, and this was a while ago, so maybe things have changed now.
I'm very happy with Namecheap. The prices are very reasonable (though I confess I have never really shopped around), the UI is functional and largely gets out of your way and lets you do what you want.