Cloudflare can be difficult at times.

I am in New Zealand and a company I worked for used Cloudflare and we found out that our site was being served from Japan most of the time (8800 km away). This meant a request would go: Auckland -> Japan -> Sydney (our data center)

The fix was to upgrade to their $200/mo plan and we found we would be served from AKL or SYD most of the time, occasionally still Japan.

This is often an internet routing issue. Also their Argo product can sometimes have bad routes chosen. Did you try their support? As a CDN, they’re very interested in fixing any performance problems quickly.

The two biggest telcos in NZ won't peer freely. At least for the biggest (Spark) Cloudflare delivers from far away.

Also Cloudflare "protected" 8chan during the Christchurch terrorist shooting last year which makes them unpopular in some quarters. I have heard that given as a reason our largest telco won't peer with them.

funny, I have distaste for cloudflare because the ceo “woke up one morning in a bad mood” and decided to boot the daily stormer. Censorship without due process. not trying to debate that decision here, but it seems they got the worst of both worlds.

The Daily Stormer shot themselves in the foot by libeling Cloudflare. Before that CF was perfectly willing to give them service, in the interests of being content-neutral provider, despite believing that the site itself was vile.

CF themselves have raised similar concerns about due process in the way they handled this particular case, but I can understand why they dropped a customer against whom they had a pretty strong case for suing.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

Hold on.

You do know The Daily Stormer is a far-right neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website that advocates for the genocide of Jews, right?

But my free speech, maaaaaan.

There's a certain subset of the tech community that entirely doesn't get that words result in real-world harm. It isn't just bytes in a database we can be indifferent to because it doesn't affect anything.

There's a certain subset of the tech community that doesn't get that speech and action are different things, and that either all speech is protected or none is.

Government is different from the private sector but as we rapidly move towards a future ruled by megacorporations, the application of rules and laws becomes ever more important.

> doesn't get that speech and action are different things, and that either all speech is protected or none is.

That only covers how government is supposed to act, right? I mean, a hosting company is free to pick how their service is used. If a client insists in abusing and breaking the law by, say, repeatedly publishing hate speech, doesn't the company has the right to act? I mean, just the reputation hit makes this a business liability.

I covered that in the 2nd paragraph. Publishing hate speech is not against the law, it's not even a real definition. The greater point is that the company can do what it wants but we should be wary as companies turn into major oligopolies/monopolies with arbitrary unaccountable policies. See Youtube and Facebook for the current crisis.

Censorship is something done by the government. Daily Stormer could have easily moved to another provider. Just because Nazis are being kicked off of private platforms doesn't mean "censorship" is being done. I'm kind of taken aback at how you think "due process" which is a legal term would be implemented by a private entity.

cool, I still would prefer to do business with clear policies governing what kind of content gets you banned.

From TFA, "For reference, we had around 100k hits on our web page in the month of June and our cost was roughly 0.79$"

At such a low amount, cost is not the main concern for most websites. Speed, reliability, and ease of development are.

Or Cloudflare workers KV. https://workers.cloudflare.com/

CloudFlare is not free for business. The free tier is for hobby projects or individuals.

That simply isn't true. You can use our free service to run a business and many small businesses do. Larger businesses typically want things we only provide on the pay plans and therefore pay for the service.

That's good to know. The description of the free tier is a bit misleading:

  Free
  Cloudflare for Individuals is built on our global network. 
  This package is ideal for people with personal or hobby projects that aren’t business-critical.

Eh, seems like expectations management to me, i.e. "don't blame us if you do something business-critical on the free tier and it goes wrong and you didn't pay for support to get you out of it".

You say that, but if you don't need/want support and don't need any of their paid features, then it's free for business.

If I was a business, I would want to pay for support. That doesn't apply to all businesses I know.