> But they could deliver potentially ~300TB with a 1gbps unmetered link. Not that hard to come by, could even get to 3PB for $300/mo.

Cloudflare Pro is $20/month per domain.

Trying to run everything through a single server in a single datacenter just doesn't compare for globally-accessed websites like this, even with a 1Gbps unmetered link.

I must be missing something, are you able to elaborate on how CentralizedPro Flare for $20 solves the OPs problems?

I've accessed plenty of sites physically located in the USA from various EU countries, not to mention AUS and I didn't notice much difference as long as they had a good interconnect.

Maybe not the best for YouTube, but there's only a few of those.

Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal and fell for CF early on but not a fan anymore since they've grown into such a behemoth.

Absolutely power corrupts absolutely.

Are you referring to the linked article? It literally explains what Cloudflare does for them.

Everything might make more sense if you visit their website: https://polyhaven.com/ It's not just a dumb, static file server.

EDIT: The questions below are literally explained in the article, so I'm going to give up on this thread.

> Everything might make more sense if you visit their website: https://polyhaven.com/ It's not just a dumb, static file server.

At a glance, it still looks like mostly a highly cached static website + search. Its not exactly a high complexity backend.

Things are always more complex at scale, so there's probably more to it then what appears at first glance, but its not obvious what that is.

Yes, and if they could pay 1/20th of their current bill to solve it, I'm sure they would.

I feel like we're heading into the weeds. Do you get the broader point I'm trying to make?

Note: my comment is no longer relevant and looks insane because Badwolff made edits to completely change their message.

Good network connectivity makes a huge difference.

Back in the day when Joyent ran their public cloud you could beat Cloudflares free plan from Joyents Japan datacenter by a tiny amount in most cases.

Anyway, those days are gone and Cloudflare provides great value and probably the best quality network available. So if you have the problem they solve then you would be a fool to not put some serious thought into considering them.

> Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal and fell for CF early on but not a fan anymore since they've grown into such a behemoth.

> Absolutely power corrupts absolutely.

This seems to capture the gist of the argument clearly. I hadn't realized cloudflare had grown large enough to fall into the "too big to not be evil" bucket already.

brace yourself before you read up on cf's origin

For the average person, why make it unnecessarily hard on yourself?

If it’s not your core competency and unless you possess the vast breadth and depth of skills to dig yourself out if something goes wrong, it seems like a distraction at best and a fatal mistake at worst, with the end result of saving 1-2 engineer hours worth of money per month.

For some self-hosting is a no-brainer, but I suspect that community is much smaller than many here would expect.

It seems disingenuous to count engineer hours at $200USD/hour for charitable donation-run projects. Is it charitable to funnel your donor money to CF? I'm sure CF is grateful for the donation..

Fact: Things break most often because of humans doing things - changes, like deployments and config modifications.

Set things up right to begin with, and in my experience you can leave them running for a long time without intervention.

Downvote all you like, but it's the truth.

> Is it charitable to funnel your donor money to CF? I'm sure CF is grateful for the donation..

Is the job getting done for the donors? I bet they don’t care about $300 if it means the website is highly available and the maintainer isn’t burned out from giving away $200/hr of opportunity cost all the time.

> Fact: Things break most often because of humans doing things - changes, like deployments and config modifications.

Totally agree, and sometimes success in your project forces your hand as you are pressed to add functionality or need to scale. If you can guarantee that you’re doing this work once, ignoring hardware failure or scaling, the scales may very well tip toward self-managed.

For a vast majority of projects, I think it just plainly makes sense to go this route, hence the success of these centralized hosts. It is the pragmatic option.

PS. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry you’re being downvoted simply for having an viewpoint that others disagree with.

I guess the question is what do you consider a long time?

RedHat usually break setups every 3-4 years which I personally consider way to frequent.

If I configure a server with automatic updates then I would like it to run with very little maintenance for at least a decade and a long time would be two plus decades.