Comment by nerdralph
1 year ago
What's the cost of annoying people trying to browse to your sites, some to the point where they'll just not bother?
1 year ago
What's the cost of annoying people trying to browse to your sites, some to the point where they'll just not bother?
This is rather blunt, but if it is between 98% (CF-protected) versus near-0% (heavily-DDoSed site), then you hopefully you now see the dilemma that other people faced.
There's absolutely no data to back up the suggestion that sites regularly suffer from DDoS.
It's like talking about getting murdered - it happens, and there are statistics, but if you're literally expecting everyone to change their whole lives based on the fact that some people are murdered, with zero consideration for the where, why and how, you're doing it wrong.
> There's absolutely no data to back up the suggestion that sites regularly suffer from DDoS.
For a random site from the internet, sure, because a random blog is probably too small to be noticed.
Forums, even relatively niche ones, unfortunately do suffer DDoS from their disgruntled users. (Or competitors of the same fandom. Or from the disgruntled part of a rivaling fandom.)
> It's like talking about getting murdered - it happens, and there are statistics, but if you're literally expecting everyone to change their whole lives based on the fact that some people are murdered, with zero consideration for the where, why and how, you're doing it wrong.
All analogies fail somewhere, but this is probably one of those which easily falls apart. Injuries are probably better. In a random population, there are a relatively small proportion of injuries, but some jobs (like construction) tend to have a significantly higher number of injuries compared to a mean person, in the same manner that a DDoS on a random website is unlikely but certain types of websites are DDoS magnets.
For companies that are just built around a marketing funnel to provide enough info to get you to fill out their contact form to sell you something, my guess is that Cloudflare is well worth the cost over increased hosting fees. I know it's not the answer anyone wants to hear, but I don't deal with too many companies selling anything more than around 5 or 6 figures, with products that you don't necessarily need very often.
I would like to know if there are alternatives somewhere close to the same cost, where I don't need to use Cloudflare. I don't enjoy annoying customers, or even dealing with sales and marketing, but I have built lots of software where I get to control the technology, and can get a new website up and running in 3 hours, with a ton of built-in functionality. I've spent about 12 years reducing the amount of memory the Umbraco CMS uses, compared to normal installs, and I love that aspect of my career. If I could get my clients to pay more and not use Cloudflare, I would happily go that route, believe me!