Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

It's seriously good value for small websites. Basically, there is no cost aside from the domain. And for registering and managing domains, they are pretty much the most affordable option as well. And they have a few other things that aren't half bad to use with pretty generous freemium layers.

We used Google's CDN for the last six years or so but it's pretty annoying to deal with and you have to pay for a load balancer every month in order to properly use it. That adds up to quite a bit per year. Even if all you are doing is routing domains to some bucket with a website.

We migrated most of our gcloud stuff to Hetzner beginning of the year. That left a load balancer and a few static websites hosted in Google buckets. I migrated all of that to Cloudflare just a few months ago.

I still have a few buckets in gcloud proxied via a vm in hetzner with a proxied domain in Cloudflare. Not the most elegant route but it works. I might optimize some of that later. At this point, we pay for some Google buckets and not much else in gcloud.

Honestly, Google and AWS need to start paying attention to Cloudflare more. Their complexity is chasing people towards Cloudflare. The hoops you have to jump through with both of them to host a simple website with their CDNs is embarrassing. I've gone through the process with both of them. Although my experience with Route53 is a bit stale at this point. On Cloudflare, getting an new website up and running with a freshly registered domain takes only a few minutes.

Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue...

Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months.

Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier.

Personally I think we absolutely should, I just don't think we will.

Barring them doing something so egregiously awful we don't have the choice, Governments can move fast when they want to but efficient government scares the shit out of me because it rarely happens outside of a genuinely serious crisis.

> The front door is not the whole stack

Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN?

On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to help keep you online and now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business.

Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there

You have to ask why they're so "generous" with giving away free services.

It's hard to beat the "free DDoS" protection of CF. Could even be considered dumping in a way

I feel like your site needs a CDN, it takes over 40 seconds to load your front page from the EU.

The problem is that we have spent 40 years adopting US technology, across multiple generations of software developers and decision makers, while everyone was supposedly on the same side.

It will take similar amount of years to go back into the cold war heterogeneous computing landscape of the 60, early 90s.

This assuming there would be an willingness across all European countries to actually push for that, and not jump out when it gets too hard and search for compromises instead.

This is why most sovereignty initiatives focus mostly on SaaS products and hardly on actual computing devices.

My employer uses CDN77. Only for serving static resources.

I'd also be interested in share of companies using a CDN in the first place. UK has 17k sites, while France and Germany, so countries with about equal and higher population than the UK, have only 4k and 6k sites behind a CDN.

I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?

Tale as old as time (or at least as the 1970s): nobody ever got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Cloudfare / AWS / Azure.

9 out of 10 corporate decisions are for blame avoidance / ass covering.

The EU needs to stop giving money to the USA in general. They contribute to their own demise by doing so. Canadians understand this so much better than the EU, so the only logical conclusion to be made is that the EU is currently controlled by US lobbyists. This would explain about 80% of the issues; the remaining issues are inertia within the EU, but it also isn't made any easier when the US government constantly favours US mega-corporations ruthlessly infiltrating and abusing other markets.

But isn't a CDN a commodity? I.e., you can switch to a different one with almost no effort.

Cloudflare interstitial pages are becoming the new cookie / GDPR pop-up for me. Remember when the internet used to be good?

Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?

In the late 90s and early 2000s the NSA and other US intelligence agencies underwent massive efforts to basically privatize the gathering of intelligence. Its a lot easier to fund your "total information awarness" initiatives via public markets and private investors than to ask congress for money to do so. So they did just that.

"In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contacted Unspam Technologies, asking, "Do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is?" The DHS' email served as the impetus for Cloudflare, a technology company Prince co-founded with Holloway and fellow Harvard Business School graduate Michelle Zatlyn the following year."

--Matthew Prince's Wikipedia page.

Dont for a second think cloudflare's generous free tier offerings are out of the goodness of their heart. They're a giant fkin MiTM project for the US governemnt. And of course, cloudflare isn't the only one.

Cloudflare is the best security company In the world.

so instead of developing actual competent solution, European complaining about why US tech dominate ?????

what stopping europe from using their home ground solution ??? nothing

this is just a skill issue take

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Yeah because it's priced well and it works. It's a no-brainer. (Also if it does go down, well so has everyone else so no big deal)

Also in this list of GOATed companies: Tailscale, Ubiquiti.

It is better for europeans to hide behind american companies. US has stronger laws, free speach, and can protects european citizens from censorship and draconian laws.

There was investigation in Germany against someone who called politician "fat". UK "hate speech" laws are very well known.

For any sort of europen sensitive content, I would use US infra.

And the same way, US companies should use german hosting...