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.
Mostly breaking it. They’re centralizing stuff and nowadays lots of services depend on that single service provider. And the original idea of the internet was to make everyone equal and have some resilience against single points of failure. That’s kind of detrimental to the whole idea.
Secondly, you unencrypt your traffic and send it to them plain so they can read everything. That may or may not be an issue for your use-case, but I like privacy and encryption and no third parties reading my messages.
And the question is: What do you need their service for? I understand that a tunnel is useful if you’re behind a NAT. But the DDoS protection and attack prevention is mostly snake-oil for most people. It’s often unnecessary, the free tier doesn’t include any of the interesting stuff and it’s questionable if most people get targeted by DDoS attacks anyways. And as I heard if it comes to that point, they will cease service to you anyways and want to see money ($240 to $2.400 per year.) So I don’t see a good reason why you’d use Cloudflare in the first place. Unless you need a tunnel or subscribe to one of the more expensive plans. Otherwise it only has downsides.
I run a small personal blog/portfolio website that doesn’t get more than a hundred or so human visits per day, but it gets hammered with bot traffic, not just malicious bots but tons of different search indexers and scrapers, many of which don’t respect robots.txt
after setting up cloudflare I noticed a very significant drop in malicious traffic and in bandwidth use, which also corresponded to less bandwidth and CPU usage for my VPS.
I know cloudflare has recently had a few bad customer service stories but for small and medium sized websites their service is invaluable
my own personal criticism of cloudflare is that, as a VPS user, I get hit by cloudflare challenges more. but now that they’ve moved to hcaptcha it’s not too bad
I think the correct way to handle this is to include a bad-bot blocker in your webserver. There are plenty scripts and addons available for the common software stacks. Is fairly easy to set up and comes with far less side-effects.
There are also local and privacy-respecting Web Application Firewalls like ModSecurity, Janusec, Vulture Project (I haven’t yet tested them) which could maybe do the same thing.
We’re all subject to these crawlers, bots and vulnerability scanners. I also run 3 small websites including mail and a few other services. I rarely block some bot that downloads images over and over again. And fail2ban blocks a lot of brute-forcing attempts. Other than that, the traffic they cause isn’t that much compared to a single other service like Matrix chat or some Fediverse software that causes lots of HTTP requests all day long. It runs without Cloudflare or other third-party services for years on my slow home internet connection. Back then even on a single board computer (like the Raspberry Pi.)
So my experience is a bit different. And that I can run 3 websites on a RasPi on a 15MBit connection just fine and other people need Cloudflare for a 1000MBit VPS makes me think it’s snake-oil. But yeah, I agree if you block the bots, they stop after some time. That’s also my experience. But the traffic isn’t that much in the first place and there are better ways to do it in my opinion.