If your website is well-coded and administered, does CloudFlare offer any performance benefit? (leaving aside security for now)<p>If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it. But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap.<p>If a page is dynamic, then how can CloudFlare really speed it up? You don't want them serving stale pages to users. So it has to hit your server every time, in which case the user might as well hit your server. In that case, I don't really see how CloudFlare improves things.<p>Am I misunderstanding how CloudFlare works? It seems like if you follow typical performance tips like [1] then most of CloudFlare's benefit is eliminated.<p>I guess [1] does tell you to use a CDN. You can save end user network latency for cached static pages, since they cache them in multiple geographic locations. But if you have a simple site with 1 .js and 1 .css file per page, and compress and minify everything, I wonder if it's worth it.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529309" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529309</a>
Silly question: How does CloudFlare make any money?<p>Any random can put any site behind their (very fully featured) free services and get free CDN, free antimalware, and free $other_services, with no seeming limits as to the amount of traffic you get. This has no impact on the target site. There are no ads or any other such. Their enterprise products only offer a few more features at a massive cost hike.<p>How are the bandwidth costs not eating them alive, and how are the free users being subsidized?
Welcome to the Cloudflare-net.<p>Half the internet is behind CloudFlare now. Since they can't easily "own" the Internet, they could as well own CloudFlare.<p>Not impressed and I hate all this hiding behind Cloudflare and other proxy services; most of the cases are just hipster/hype powered, rather than in actual need.
Is Amazon competing in this space? Since AWS is used heavily in the startup world, it seems like a no brainer to also provide cloudflare functionality, more so given that they have servers all over the world.
Well, that alone makes the move to CloudFlare even more unlikely at all. More huge investors means more control over what CF does and what CF will do with all the data they see flowing through. Bigest MITM just got bigger, at least financial wise.<p>Not for me.
Why Qualcomm? They make mobile chips. Are we going to see SoCs specially optimized for communicating with CloudFlare servers? That sounds like a potentially bad idea.
Yeah, at this point, we honestly and genuinely need large CloudFlare competitors.<p>So hopefully one of their competitors is able to get more competitive.
Following this iOS Content Blocker furore, a CloudFlare-type service could be an ideal place from which to inject and serve ads; as opposed to the client-perf-sapping script tags the industry has been using so far.
I can't get to the original link, something forbes is messing with, however this works:<p><a href="http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2015/09/22/google-microsoft-qualcomm-and-baidu-announce-joint-investment-cloudflare/" rel="nofollow">http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.forbes.com/sites...</a>
Personally I dislike CloudFlare for the simple reason that they encourage site owners to use their <i>lossless</i> image optimisation service, which isn't lossless. Thus many images appear different than intended when hosted behind CloudFlare. I wrote about this earlier: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192587" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192587</a><p>Quote from their website.<p><i>The Lossless mode removes all the unnecessary bloat from an image file, such as the image header and meta data, without removing any image data. This means images will appear exactly the same as they would have before.</i><p>The last sentence is false, at least for images with color profiles on all non-mobile browsers. There are other possible minor cases.
See also, discussion of the CloudFlare blog post: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10215560" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10215560</a>
So does Cloudflare now get around the slowness of passing through the Great Firewall? (Currently, I don't use CF and our website is slow from inside China.)
I'd love to see more transparency in the way Cloudflare, or CDNs in general, decide to cache or not cache your content. For example: Cloudflare publishes crawl frequencies in their pricing table but what do they actually do with that content? Push it to all their edges? I'd doubt that. I guess it's based on website traffic, your website pricing plan, ... but it seems quite arbitrary to me.
Why was Fidelity not mentioned in the headline?<p><a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fidelity-google-microsoft-baidu-and-qualcomm-back-cloudflare-to-help-build-a-better-internet-2015-09-22" rel="nofollow">http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fidelity-google-microsoft-b...</a>
I liked the CloudFlare concept (protecting good people) until I found it protects bad people as well: scammers, thieves, cybersquatters, phishing. CloudFlare makes it very difficult to contact the web host cloaked by CloudFlare.<p>CloudFlare is helping the scum of the Internet. They need to be held accountable for what they're serving, if they're not going to reveal who is hosting the site. If there's a way to find the originating IP of these scumbags, I would like to know. Obviously traceroute doesn't work because the IPs show up as CloudFlare.<p>The way I see it, CloudFlare should be required to publish who is hosting the websites they cloak. Otherwise you're encouraging a lawless Internet where anything goes without any consequences. I sincerely hope these larger companies address this problem.<p>I hope some journalists dig into this because I think there's a good story here. Maybe CloudFlare doesn't have the staff to review the activities of the sites they're protecting? That's a serious problem, in my opinion, because their cloaking technology is very effective.
I am a long-standing CF partner and supporter. This really does not fill me with happy, warm thoughts. I love the CF tech and offering, but am going to be forced to look around for alternatives.
<p><pre><code> “The world is looking for their Android,” Prince says. “We’re the Android of cloud services.”
</code></pre>
I can't tell if this is inane exec-speak or if this means they really intend to branch out into stuff like a dropbox/gdrive storage product and a compute/ec2 like service.<p>full disclosure: I start work for a competitor at the end of the month