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Do Not Put Your Site Behind Cloudflare if You Don’t Need To

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At the time of writing 12:43 UTC on Tuesday November 18, Cloudflare has shut down multiple sites. I’m trying to browse the web, but about half the sites are showing the error:

cloudflare.webp

Most of these sites are not even that big. I’m expecting maybe a few thousand visitors per month.

This again demonstrates a simple fact: if you put your site behind a centralized service, that service has a single point of failure. Even large established companies make mistakes and can go under.

Most people use Cloudflare because they are intimidated by the idea that you need DDoS protection. Well, maybe you do, but maybe you don’t.

As they say in security, “No one will burn zero days on you!”. For your small blog with a hundred visitors per month, it’s probably the same: “No one will waste their DDoS capabilities on you!”

I don’t know how else to say it. Many people keep talking about the importance of the decentralized web, and then continue to put their sites behind Cloudflare.

If you really want to be safe in case your server goes down, setup another version of your site in another location and point to that server via A and AAAA records, see “Round-Robin DNS”.

Perhaps this is the origin of this message. Face your fears. Put your service on the Internet. Maybe it will go down, but at least not with another Cloudflare outage.



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