News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Set up a practically free CDN by samwillis on Saturday January 15, 2022 @01:17PM (#29948756)
This B2/CloudFlare combination is a good one.

CloudFlare are about to launch their own object/file store with native CDN called R2. They have even come up with a wonderful trick for migrating to it from S3 and it’s looks like it’s going to have an incredible generous level of free egress. I suspect that it will beat out the B2/CloudFlare combination once it launches.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/

Edit: Typo

Re:Set up a practically free CDN by schleck8 on Saturday January 15, 2022 @02:00PM (#29949149)
> CloudFlair

I wanted to look up whether cloudflair.com was already registered, and apparently the registrar is cloudflare themselves. That's funny

Re:Set up a practically free CDN by nexuist on Saturday January 15, 2022 @06:45PM (#29951668)
Pretty common strategy. Facebook owns facebok.com, Apple owns aple.com, Google owns gogle.com, etc. Scammers try to buy domains that sound or type similar to legitimate companies (practice known as "typosquatting") and use this to fool customers into thinking they're on the real website. One easy way to combat this is to just pay up and buy all the domains that are "closely typed" to your real one and have them all redirect to your property.
Re:Set up a practically free CDN by philliphaydon on Sunday January 16, 2022 @12:08AM (#29953563)
About 10 years ago a friend showed me Google ad words and Google analytics. He could see miss-spelling searches sometimes ending up at his site. He purchased about 20 domains and adwords of different miss spellings and his traffic went up about 35% on his site.
Re:Set up a practically free CDN by samwillis on Saturday January 15, 2022 @02:10PM (#29949229)
Ha! Oops, shouldn’t try to do the kids bedtime and write a reply at the same time…
Re:Set up a practically free CDN by outloudvi on Saturday January 15, 2022 @01:39PM (#29948978)
Yes. Cloudflare is doing many of their own stuffs recently: serverless, image processing, stream processing, mail forwarding, storage etc.
Re:Set up a practically free CDN by atlgator on Saturday January 15, 2022 @03:55PM (#29950156)
Cloudflare stock is cheap right now too.
Re:Set up a practically free CDN by dillondoyle on Saturday January 15, 2022 @04:11PM (#29950311)
What is your opinion on what's driving the movement?

I went in fairly big (for me) and sold near the top with a stop loss #gainz. Then bought again when it went down like 10% trying to 'buy the dip.' But it keeps falling!

I don't get it. I love their products and ambition. That was a huge bump and decline.

Re:Set up a practically free CDN by candiddevmike on Saturday January 15, 2022 @04:17PM (#29950371)
Not the parent but I think Cloudflare's free tier is too good and the paid offerings don't compete well if you're all in on a cloud provider already. It also may be the classic Cloudflare has "features" but doesn't have a "product".

Anecdotally, I have yet to work with a company paying Cloudflare substantial amounts of money.

Re:Set up a practically free CDN by samwillis on Saturday January 15, 2022 @04:50PM (#29950681)
I feel they are fairly early on in there “full stack” strategy. I believe they are moving quickly from launching MVPs for various products to expanding them as rapidly as they can. They are also purposely not trying to compete 1:1 with the incumbents with the “full stack”

“Workers” is brilliant, but the strategy with WASM on it is where I really think it is going to shine. The more languages and more of your stack that can be compelled to WASM the more you will be able to run on their edge. I truly believe WASM is the future in so many places other than in the browser.

I also feel the one part of their stack that’s missing is a transactional acid database (I hope for sql, but nosql would be fine). But it highlights a fault with the “edge first” strategy. Workers at the edge making multiple round trip requests to a central database is slower than running your app closer to the db. My wish is that they are developing some sort of edge replaced db that automatically launches read replicas at the same edge locations as where most of your worker load is. You probably have to have the main/master in a central location though. (I think Fly.io are doing something a little like this with Postgres)

Re:Set up a practically free CDN by dillondoyle on Saturday January 15, 2022 @04:32PM (#29950509)
Interesting. I like that whole view of a product. Like how do you describe Cloudflare's produce in one sentence.

Maybe something about 'large edge network cloud to reach your customer quicker' or something I'm not sure how to describe it in a compelling way. Maybe sprinkle on some web3 or distributed bs.

I think AWS, now Google is getting there, have that a lot of stickyness because it has all the services imaginable interconnected (not well sometimes but still). It's a platform not individual products. It's hard to pickup and leave, especially if Cloudflare doesn't have 1:1 replacements.

Re:Set up a practically free CDN by meltedcapacitor on Saturday January 15, 2022 @08:42PM (#29952452)
If someone offered you a burger for $500 you probably would not buy it, even if it was very good. Even if they suddenly discounted it to $350. It's just too much money for a burger.

This thing makes like $500m of annual revenue, not profit, whatever path to profitability one can imagine, hard to see how it can be "worth" $32000m. It's like 5000 years of earnings are priced in along with the assumption competitors don't try too hard for the same time period.

Basically every reality-based investor has long left the room. It's a meme stock. It's Dogecoin for devops kids. Underlying biz does not matter for meme stocks, one must look at what the meme lovers do, what trend they follow, etc. At the moment they're being moody, that's why it's down for now along with similar memetech stocks.

As a bonus they provide the captchas for all the crypto sites. When that sugar daddy leaves the room, LOL.

Re:Set up a practically free CDN by gen220 on Monday January 17, 2022 @10:34AM (#29967564)
It’s gross margin and revenue growth are comparable to FB’s of 8ish years ago (gross margin sits around 80%. FB’s today is 90%, insanity). Even after it’s recent drop in valuation, NET is trading at a higher revenue multiple today than FB was at that time.

FB was probably undervalued 8ish years ago. But FB also had a clearer narrative around TAM and LTV than NET does.

The current price bakes in some biggish assumptions (1) NET’s TAM is not even close to saturated (2) LTV per customer will keep growing as NET adds on new services that existing customers will want to pay for. There are many valid reasons to believe this, if you follow their earnings calls.

That doesn’t mean today’s price is bona fide bad or good. Rather, it reflects Wall St’s faith in Cloudflare’s ability to materialize grand-but-achievable ambitions.

The earlier peak price had far too much growth priced in, it was not sustainable imo. When price outpaces value, it’s normal to see a correction.

Re:Set up a practically free CDN by atlgator on Saturday January 15, 2022 @04:51PM (#29950685)
There may be fundamentals at play related to their product offering/pricing too but pure growth companies with negative earnings have been getting routed with the announcement of Fed tapering and interest rate increases. That's the main thing driving Cloudflare's price down.
Re:Set up a practically free CDN by ZephyrBlu on Saturday January 15, 2022 @09:17PM (#29952639)
This. It has nothing to do with Cloudflare specifically.
Re:Set up a practically free CDN by stillicidious on Saturday January 15, 2022 @10:32PM (#29953005)
If you think it's cheap now, wait til you see it after a 50bps rates move
Re:Set up a practically free CDN by juliosueiras on Saturday January 15, 2022 @03:01PM (#29949667)
funny enough, B2+Cloudflare will still be cheaper, since Cloudflare R2 from the blog you linked is at the cost of $0.015/GB/month for stored storage, where as B2 is $0.005/GB/month for stored storage, and there is no download cost when using the B2+Cloudflare combo