Me too, but in a way I'm even happier knowing that not everyone does and something else popular exists too.

Google's Firebase platform uses Fastly so that's a significant chunk of the web.

Now imagine how many sites would go down if it was CF

No need to imagine! Just search HN for "cloudflare outage" and you'll see that it happened several times over the last few years

Is this a call for competition? I regard Cloudflare as state-of-the-art in terms of security and ease-of-use. I certainly hope their knowledge replicates across other organizations. As of now they're still building highly impactful tools that are easy to use and that noone else quite provides. I don't really expect another organization to match them given the strength of their current leadership. I think they've built in a head start for awhile.

> Cloudflare as state-of-the-art in terms of security and ease-of-use

Depends whose security. I value my security dearly and that's why i use the Tor Browser. Cloudflare has decided i cannot browse any of their websites if i care about my security (they filter out tor users and archiving bots agressively) so i'm not using any cloudflare-powered website. Is it good for security that we prevent people from using security-oriented tooling, and let a single multinational corporation decide who gets to enter a website or not? In my book creating a SPOF is already bad practice, but having them filter out entrances is even worse.

Also, are all of these CDNs and other cloud providers are solving the right problems?

If you want your service to be resilient against DDOS attacks, you don't need such huge infrastructure. I've seen WP site operators move to Cloudflare because they had no caching in place, let alone a static site.

If you want better connectivity in remote places where our optic fiber overlords haven't invested yet, P2P technology has much better guarantees than a CDN (content-addressing, no SPOF). IPFS/dat/Freenet/Bittorrent... even multicast can be used for spreading content far and wide.

Why do sysadmins want/use CDNs? Can't we find better solutions? Solutions that are more respectful to spiders and privacy-minding folks with NoScript and/or Tor Browser?

Speaking for myself here, I don't see how people can use the web without javascript. As for Tor, you're routing other people's traffic while they route yours, so I can understand how such connections would be blocked given that blocking IPs is still a method for mitigating security issues, and you can't determine the IP of a Tor browser.

> I don't see how people can use the web without javascript.

Its pretty easy: browse marked up documents, not applications. If some developer conflates the first for the second, move on.

> As for Tor, you're routing other people's traffic while they route yours

Using Tor doesn't imply that your machine is also a Tor exit node.

They have also been responsible for one the worst security incidents ever:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752

Only discovered we should not forget,due to the good graces of google project zero.

A certain those of skepticism towards any technical offer out there would be advised.

I like Cloudflare's post mortems, and I like how they fight back against patent trolls. For me as a dev they are #1.

Do you have experience with the competitors?

I prefer tech that I can use both at work and on hobby projects at home.

To that end I've only used cloudflare and netlify. The others have too much friction to try out. I expect I would get experience on the job if necessary.

Do more rely on Cloudflare? Because this felt like it was more than half the internet, certainly more than half the biggest sites.

I think so, Fastly seems to have a few huge enterprise clients while Cloudflare seems more balanced (and larger)

I think that Fastly starts at $50/month, no free tier. So that would preclude small or not-profit-motivated sites from using it.

interesting thought ... a new type of 'to big to fail' ?

No more than a transatlantic cable...

Where is Akamai in this comparison?

Fair point. Maybe Fastly is more akin to Akamai given it seems to be more enterprise-y. By market cap, Cloudflare is 26 billion, Akamai is 18, and Fastly is 6.

Fastly's free offering gives you "$50 worth of traffic" whereas Cloudflare has a perpetually free option. And for Akamai you have to apply for a free trial.

This is market cap, but if you look at amount of traffic you have Akamai estimated at 15-30%, CF at 10%.

So if it would go down, it would cripple vast amount of internet.

Akamai is balls deep in video streaming, which is probably the most bandwidth/traffic intense thing for a CDN to dabble with. My guess is that CF has much more diverse traffic. Hence the fallout from an interruption would be quite different.

Not quite, Akamai is more large corp centric (they don't serve average Joe) besides that they do also security. If it went down you would get all of sudden e.g. a lot of DDOS possible.