That being said the speed boost is very obvious :)
When it's with HN it shows something like the twitter feed of @HNStatus pointing out the CloudFlare server as Johannesburg with a request id (I think).
When it's with reddit it shows the reddit mascot crushed up with his orange beady eyes over a pile of orange stuff. Scary stuff.
Next time it happens, will screenshot and send to cloudflare.
I saw a cloudflare gateway timeout on HN within the last hour, and the twitter feed had a recent post excusing some technical issue.
At first, I wondered why the HN Feed never explained the downtime. Then it made sense, it must be cloudflare.
Given that CloudFlare is everywhere & on everyone's websites, it's a pain when it behaves this way affecting users all over a continent.
Uptime websites also report the site as up.
Your company's motives are not pure and altruistic. Don't pretend they are.
Huh?
Let's be clear: CloudFlare is a for-profit company and hence wants to take in more money than it spends. We do that by getting people to pay us. Our revenue is from web site owners paying us. It's pretty clear what our business model is: pay is a little for bandwidth and hardware is possible, get web site owners to pay us.
The problem comes later, as it does when any company gets big enough. Few years down the line, the board of directors has a look over the company and see's a big opportunity: all that data you're flowing around can be turned into money with some very clever thinking at 'no real loss to anyone'.
People don't like to leave money on the table if they can just find a clever enough way to put it in their pockets, and more than enough very smart people saying "hey, pay me a little bit and I'll get all that nice money off the table for you - nobody will mind, privacy is dead anyway!"
When they pay for our service they are trusting us with their DNS and HTTP traffic. If CloudFlare were to start messing with their data it breaks that trust and we lose our customers. We'd end up biting the hand that feeds us.
Most companies that see a lot of traffic, could decide to engage in shady side activities to monetize every bit of data they see. But no leadership in their right mind would want to take that sort of gamble.
It's interesting that the "evil eye of sauron" argument always comes up for discussion involving CloudFlare, but is never even mentioned for companies like Akamai. My guess is because of the freemium approach which "has to have a catch, right?". But CloudFlare is a proven business model with substantial revenues coming from people who like and trust the service. There is no catch.
ps. former employee here who joined on the idea, and still firmly believes of offering a quality service for a very affordable cost, without being deceitful.
We are already live in Johannesburg and there will be many more.