I do enjoy some of the free cloudflare services for personal projects, but to act like they provide some great infallible business structure or services is ridiculous.

I put https://www.gbif.org/ behind Cloudflare on the business plan, and so far (it's been roughly a year) we've only had a couple of reports of blocking, and both seemed likely to be caused by other users on the same IP scraping the site.

Sometimes sites like hubspot block me without WARP, but it's usually small blogs or technical project sites that give me trouble.

So it could have to do with free vs paid plans being more aggressive with default rules.

On the topic of caching I run my own edge nodes, no regrets. Privacy maintained, finer grained controls, no large scale ddos protection but I have never needed it.

I'm not doing Anycast or GSLB as it is just for a hobby site. If it ever grew in popularity (unlikely) then I would probably just do DNS GSLB in PowerDNS with PowerGSLB.

For me it was not a lot of work because it is a hobby. I'm sure others here could automate this in Anisble, Docker, Podman and probably have. My setup is probably childs-play compared to what others here do professionally.

Everyone else just goes along for the ride if they want to enjoy the same convenience, as long as they can stomach it.

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