CloudFlare is a very helpful service if you are a website owner and don’t want to deal with separate services for CDN, DNS, basic DDOS protection and other (superficial) security needs. You can have all these services in a one-stop-shop and you can have it all for free. It’s hard to pass up the offer and go for a commercial solution. Generally speaking, Cloudflare service is as stable as they come, their downtime and service interruption is within the same margin as other similar services, at least to my experience. I know this because I have used them for two of my other websites, until recently.
But what about the users? If you live in a First World Country then, for the most part, you probably wouldn’t notice much difference, other than better speed and response time for the websites using Cloudflare services, you will be happy to know that because of their multiple datacenter locations mostly in the USA, Canada, Europe, and China, short downtimes won’t result in service interruptions for you because you will be automatically rerouted to their nearest Cloudflare data center and they have plenty to go around within the first world countries.
But what about the rest of us? I can only talk about my experience, I live in South East Asia (SEA). As it is normally the case for us we are treated as second class citizens on the Internet, often a most premium, and sometimes freemium services, are limited to developed nations. We have to resort to Proxies and VPNs to enjoy the same freedom internet users from developed nations are used to. But other than that, for the most part, we enjoy the same basic internet freedom as the rest of most of the world. Unless of course, your website is using Cloudflare services.
You see CloudFlare has these “Security” features which can prompt users belonging to certain IP blocks, countries, blacklists or behavioral patterns and either automatically block you to visit some sites (rare, but often done by Site Owners discretion) or prompt you for reCAPTCHA (much better than the ridiculous captcha they had before) before you can visit the site. reCAPTCHA prompts happens a lot, I know its only one click away, but we shouldn’t have to deal with this annoying pseudo security measure. The entirety of the StackExchange sites is under the Cloudflare firewall. As it is often the case, a lot of my searches often end up to one of the StackExchange sites and if I visit the link through Google search results I am prompted for the captcha, but curiously I don’t get prompted if I directly visit the site. I wish it was only limited to StackExchange, because of CloudFlare’s ludicrous free one-stop-shop offering and their aggressive partnership with cheap hosting service, every joe with a website is using Cloudflare. So that one click per site per day often results in 30-40 clicks per day or more.
I wish it was something to do with only my IP. You see I co-own an ISP, we have four /22 IP blocks (4096 IPs) while I didn’t get a chance to test all our IPs but all of them I have personally checked (about 500+) over the last year gets prompted for captchas. It’s not only limited to our IP blocks, It happens on my phone when I am using my telco’s internet or services from a couple of dozen of ISPs I have tried in my country. We often do market research for service quality of our competition, so it happens a lot.
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