I am a plebe who doesn’t understand these things but what exactly does cloudflare do? I see it popping up more and more often redirecting before visiting a site. I assume that this has something to do with bot traffic? It seems like every mention of cloudflare is about how it ruined someone’s day.
My day is regularly ruined by cloud flare, and I don’t run a bot net. Because instead of doing their job they decided to declare my entire regional IP block a spam source. Now, no doubt there might have been one bad actor who used one IP in this IP block once. The entire block is for residential IPs though. But we all have to suffer degraded service because cloud flare can’t be bothered, and as a private user of the internet, I have no resource or place to complain. Not even my ISP has recourse because cloud flare answer is “we don’t care about your clients”.
Yeah it gets sticky like that with VPNs as well. I run an always-on VPN (PIA), and depending on which server I’m connected through, it’s either a good day or a bad day. Sometimes switching servers works, others not so much.
That’s not how it works.
Except that’s exactly how it works. Cloudflare keeps a record and rating of all IPs in the world. This rating determines the speed of response from the server and the number of security checks before traffic is let through to the protected server that is being queried. This rating is based on over 40 different surveyors that track and monitor spam mail sources, botnets, ISPs and data centers, and can flag IPs as bad actors. These records are available online.
My ISP rotates IP addresses to clients every so often and after router restarts. One particular block is locked and throttled to hell. Sometimes, certain webpages stop working altogether for me, as if traffic is blocked. Or response speeds get excruciatingly slow. Every time it is because I have been given an IP in that exact IP block, tracing the hops shows that cloud flare servers are the bottleneck. Checking it on IP trust records confirms they are flagged as bad actors. It’s not my ISP nor their infrastructure, as using a VPN instantaneously restores high speeds and response times, and magically a cloud flare page shows up to check for a human.
I have also checked directly with my ISP and they confirm that there’s absolutely nothing wrong on their end, it is cloudflare servers blocking the traffic to some webpages, nothing they can do about it. They have contacted them and they refuse to provide answers as we are in a country sanctioned by the US, so international commercial relations are hindered with bureaucracy.
The worst part is that I can sort of bypass these problems with a VPN, but non cloudflare VPNs are also throttled and trigger anti bot checks every single time. So there’s no win for me. My ISP’s solution is to keep rotating IPs at random hoping clients spent the least amount of time affected by these issues.