Item — HN Reader

At some point we really need to think if this is the web we want, one/two major actors are down and everything goes with it

Not downplaying the immense work of infra / engineering at this scale but my neighborhood local grocery market shouldn’t be down

11 comments

Decentralisation is at some point directly opposed to operational efficiency, when the sun is shining.

A shark is an extremely energy efficient creature, but it is relatively stupid.

At some point every website will be the equivalent of Surströmming

And centralization is ineffective long term

It's hard not to use Cloudflare at least for me: good products, "free" for small projects, and if Cloudflare is down no one will blame you since the internet is down.

> if Cloudflare is down no one will blame you since the internet is down.

That is true. it is also the problem. It means the biggest providers do not even need to bother to be reliable because everyone will use them anyway.

Well, no. If they are unreliable to the point of being an outlier when compared to the alternatives then people will switch. At this stage they’re not an outlier.

"Accountability Sinks"

https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks

> if Cloudflare is down no one will blame you since the internet is down.

But this is not really the case. When Azure/AWS were down, same as this one with Cloudflare: significant amount of web was down but most of it was not. It just makes more obvious which provider you use.

Think about this rationally. If Cloudflare doesn't fix it within reasonable time, you can just point to different name servers and have your problem fixed in minutes.

So why be on Cloudflare to start with? Well, if you have a more reliable way then there's no reason. If you have a less reliable way, then you're on average better off with Cloudflare.

Well I can't change my NS since it's on Cloudflare too but besides that my personal opinion was not about this outage in particular but more the default approach of some websites that don't need all this tech (yes I really was out of groceries)

Is Cloudflare your domain registrar? In that case, yes I think you should think about being less dependent on them.

As for websites which don't need Cloudflare, in my experience almost every website will be DdoS attacked from time to time.

There’s certainly a business case for “which nines” after the talk of n nines. You ideally want to be available when your competitor, for instance, is not.

Why everyone needs to be behind Cloudflare. I don't think DDOSing sites out of whim is so rampant that everyone needs the virtual umbrella.

It's the web-scrapers. I run a tiny little mom and pop website, and the bots were consistently using up all of my servers' resources. Cloudfare more or less instantly resolved it.

Caching would have been the correct answer

You mean you outsourced to Cloudflare the decision on who is allowed to view your website. That could be well-intentioned, but it's a risky thing to do, and I would not to outsource that decision. Especially as I wouldn't know who failed to get to my website as there is no way to appeal the decision.

As a side note, what does your site do that it's possible to use up all server resources? Computers are stupid fast these days. I find it's really difficult to build something that doesn't scale to at least multiple hundreds of requests per second.

I’ve been DDoS’d countless times running a small scale, uncontroversial SaaS. Without them I would’ve had countless downtime periods with really no other way to mitigate.

There's plenty of DDoS if you're dealing with people petty enough.

The VPS I use will nuke your instance if you run a game server. Not due to resource usage, but because it attracts DDoS like nothing else. Ban a teen for being an asshole and expect your service to be down for a week. And there isn't really Cloudflare for independent game servers. There's Steam Networking but it requires the developer to support it and of course Steam.

Valve's GDC talk about DDoS mitigation for games: https://youtu.be/2CQ1sxPppV4

> And there isn't really Cloudflare for independent game servers

And yet game servers still work fine. Which answers this subthread's question ("how likely is it to get DDoSed if you don't have Cloudflare"), answer: not very likely, it happens once in a while at most.

It actually is.

I run a small video game forum with posts going back to 2008. We got absolutely smashed by bots scraping for training data for LLMs.

So I put it behind Cloudflare and now it's down. Ho hum.

Have you tried Anubis or similar tools? I've had similar issues with bot scraping of a forum taking all server resources, and using PoW challenge solved the problem.

https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

Can you please elaborate on “smashed”? I’m very interested

Same problem here. If I didn't use Cloudflare, nearly all of my traffic would be (apparently misconfigured) scraper bots.

It'd funny if these bots were run by Cloudflare.

I was arrested by Interpol in 2018 because of warrants issued by the NCA, DOJ, FBI, J-CAT, and several other agencies, all due to my involvement in running a DDoS-for-hire website. Honestly, anyone can bypass Cloudflare, and anyone that want to take your website down - will take it down. It's just that luckily for all of us most of the DDoS-4-hire websites are down nowadays but there are still many botnets out there that will get past basically any protection and you can get access to them for basically $5.

One minute, what? Can you elaborate on that. I have loads of questions. What exactly were you doing? What consequences did you face? How come you are talking about it?

> anyone can bypass Cloudflare

How?

Good chance the reason DDOSing isn't so big anymore is because everyone is on Cloudflare.

There are plenty of alternatives to protect against DDoSing, people like convenience though. “Nobody gets fired for choosing Microsoft/Cloudflare”. We have a culture problem

It's not super common, but common enough that I don't want to deal with it.

The other part is just how convenient it is with CF. Easy to configure, plenty of power and cheap compared to the other big ones. If they made their dashboard and permission-system better (no easy way to tell what a token can do last I checked), I'd be even more of a fan.

If Germany's Telekom was forced to peer on DE-CIX, I'd always use CF. Since they aren't and CF doesn't pay for peering, it's a hard choice for Germany but an easy one everywhere else.

DDOSing is absolutely so rampant that you need to be behind something.

Cloudflare DDOS protection is super essential (especially for smaller businesses)

Honestly it kinda is. Ai bots scrape everything now, social media means you can go viral suddenly, or you make a post that angers someone and they launch an attack just because. I default to cloudflare, because like an umbrella I might just be carrying it around most of the time, but in the case of a sudden downpoor it's better than getting wet.

Setting up a replica and then pointing your api requests at it when cloudflare request fails is trivial. This way if you have a SPA and as long as your site/app is open the users won't notice.

The issue is DNS since DNS propagation takes time. Does anyone have any ideas here?

> Setting up a replica and then pointing your api requests at it when cloudflare request fails is trivial.

Only if you're doing very basic proxy stuff. If you stack multiple features and maybe even start using workers, there may be no 1:1 alternatives to switch to. And definitely not trivially.

Two domains for your api perhaps, a full blown SPA could try one and then the other.

Owning your IP space and using Anycast.

> At some point we really need to think if this is the web we want,

You think we have a say in this?

The HN crowd in particular absolutely has a say in this, given the amount of engineering leads, managers, and even just regular programmers/admins/etc that frequent here - all of whom contribute to making these decisions.

You have the power to not host your own infrastructure on aws and behind cloudflare, or in the case of an employer you have the power to fight against the voices arguing for the unsustainable status quo.

It's not the web we want, but it's the web corporations want. And everybody else doesn't give a damn.

Believe me it’s what people want. The alternative is far worse.

We? I am not using it. I never used it and I will not use it. People should learn how to work with firewall, setup a simple ModSecurity WAF and stop using this bullshit. Almost everything goes through cloudflare and cloudflare also does TLS fronting for websites so basically cloudflare is MITM spying proxy but no one seem to care. :/

BLOCKCHAINS! I mean, some sort of P2P hosting and/or node discovery would be nice.