Comment by greatgib
1 hour ago
2 things comes to my mind reading this article:
1) So they saved 15ms on the connection so that you can then wait 20s in their annoying nag screen before reaching the real website content.
2) On the Monday they complain about the load on server by LLM scrapings compulsively your webserver an offer themselves as the internet guardian solution; and on Tuesday, they compulsively send useless requests to your servers so that they can save a few microseconds in the very first connection ever to your server. "For each TLS 1.3 capable origin, we run a series of a few lightweight TLS handshakes, each offering exactly one key agreement group: X25519, P-256, P-384, P-521, or X25519MLKEM768. [...] And because the active scanning happens outside your production traffic path, we confirm that both your origin and the network in between can handle connections with a stronger key agreement before any real traffic depends on it.
Agree on point 1. Now even tiny websites that wouldn't be a target for anyone are hiding behind Cloudfare. If you are so worried about people sending requests to your website then take it offline, that will get you 100% success preventing bots
I'm so tired of having to do Captchas and waiting everywhere to access websites
As someone who hosts a few “tiny websites” that are “hiding behind Cloudflare”, it’s because of some incredibly misbehaved botnet traffic that’s otherwise persistently scraping via residential proxies.
This is a hobby for me. It’s for my enjoyment and it allows me to provide resources that others enjoy using. However, I’m not going to allow literally 99%+ of requests to be aggressive scrapers that won’t give up until you’ve got a heavy-handed solution in place.
I hate it too, but the alternative is even more consolidation, so unfortunately this is just the reality right now and you’ll have to get over it until when/if things improve.
>they compulsively send useless requests
Those requests aren't useless; They clearly optimize. What a silly take.
>to your servers
To their customer's servers, right! Most people turn on other CF optimizations like h2/h3 to origin.
2) Perhaps theres a slight difference between thousands of requests per day from untrusted entities and a single TLS handshake per day from a trusted one? (Note i understand you clearly don't trust cloudflare, but the people who sign up for cloudflare do trust them - that's the trust relationship i refer to here.)