Comment by bayindirh
4 days ago
> Cloudflare Is Awesome
Until their systems block you for no reason. I recently had a similar issue on a work related site. Fortunately, I was able to reach to the administrator (which is on another country) and had the knowledge to write a report which was useful enough for the said administrator.
And this is for a system which has the same static IP which is not shared with anything for 10ish years.
I recently, with great reluctance, had to put a personal site behind Cloudflare free option. It gets lots of use, but brings no revenue (costs me to run) and I have little spare time.
Found out that I was blocked from it in my default setup. Firefox with default settings, and no VPN.
I'm working hard to turn Cloudflare off.
Cloudflare is not remotely awsome. It's also a solution to a problem (aggressive scrapers that produce DOS) which is worse.
What malicious usage are you seeing? You might have a lot more usage than me, but fail2ban has been enough
Just very high usage all of a sudden, after years of reasonable usage. Google has indexed it (respectfully) since 2008 just fine.
New traffic isn't humans. I blocked some AI scraper user-agents, which helped, a bit. But most new user agents are identifying as vanilla browsers, not scrapers.
I don't have numbers. It was enough to consume all nginx worker_connections. Raising the number doesn't help, as it's just reverse proxying to JVM.
After the switch, Cloudflare showed USA and Singapore as heavy traffic sources.
I don't mind scrapers on the site, but app is a search engine (of sorts) so every page view consumes some CPU. Including 'facet this search' buttons. My (WIP) solution is to rewrite to make it all client-side and put it all on a CDN.
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> 10ish years
Systems get infected, and new "residential proxies" get made of unsuspecting internet subscribers all the time.
It's just another IP to them.
The machine in question is not a Windows installation connected to a home router.