* Cloudflare operates at a scale where its caching saves a lot of bandwidth, which saves ISPs money, which makes Cloudflare an attractive partner for peering and co-location.
* CDN is a platform on top of which Cloudflare can offer a lot of additional services that used to be expensive dedicated middleboxes.
It's unclear as it shouldn't be possible to be cheap. That said, in a world of data, Cloudflare being a massive man in the middle (MITM) probably means something [1].
[1] Cloudflare decrypts your traffic, reads it, and then forwards it. They see all encrypted data going to and from your website, in plaintext.
Their business model is described in their S1 filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...
* Cloudflare operates at a scale where its caching saves a lot of bandwidth, which saves ISPs money, which makes Cloudflare an attractive partner for peering and co-location.
* CDN is a platform on top of which Cloudflare can offer a lot of additional services that used to be expensive dedicated middleboxes.
They manage to be cheap because it's massively multitenant infra
It's unclear as it shouldn't be possible to be cheap. That said, in a world of data, Cloudflare being a massive man in the middle (MITM) probably means something [1].
[1] Cloudflare decrypts your traffic, reads it, and then forwards it. They see all encrypted data going to and from your website, in plaintext.
This data collection project has a name: "Project Honey Pot" (and had excellent relations with FBI), look closely the story that led to Cloudflare.
https://www.projecthoneypot.org/cloudflare_beta.html
Wow. This is a travesty if I've ever known one. Hopefully, that can be posted and upvoted on HN.
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