Both Lemmy.world and my server rely upon Cloudflare for SSL, DDOS protection, CDN services, etc. I use it to provide me with a Cloudflare tunnel to get around not being able to forward ports.
Outages have put this dependance to question, and the same with recent news about the US government obtaining data through subpoenas. It’s a free service that takes care of many of the difficulties when it comes to hosting your service online, but everyone knows that free is not free.
What do you all think about Cloudflare?
I am not fond of Cloudflare. Captchas are intrusive—especially for VPN users—and better alternatives exist for getting rid of bots. E.g., Iocaine or Anubis (although Anubis has its problems [not that iocaine doesn’t, although I find iocaine better]).
Also, as infrastructure goes, it’s positively mad to rely on a centralized service like Cloudflare.