Comment by Herz
11 hours ago
How does Cloudflare manage to hit the HN front page almost daily? Don't get me wrong, they build cool stuff, but the frequency is wild.
11 hours ago
How does Cloudflare manage to hit the HN front page almost daily? Don't get me wrong, they build cool stuff, but the frequency is wild.
Because it's their release week, so there's multiple new products every day. The overlap of people using HN and Cloudflare is pretty large, so not that surprising.
A related Q: why are their products so popular? I get why CDN/DDOS protection is but what about everything else? I have never ever found a use for stuff like Workers. (Sincerely asking, not dismissing them as useless)
Workers is compute-on-demand and particularly only pay what you use. Especially in the current days, something like Workers is infinitely appealing if you don't want to manage or pay for a dedicated server, assuming the service you want to run can be completely hosted (or a replacement vibe-coded) for the Service Workers API / deployed to CF's platform.
You also don't pay for actual data transfer, so the billing is overall simpler - AWS and GCP have similar per-request compute options, but every part of the platform has extra fees (like per-gb data transfer billing, sometimes you need a VPC to interconnect services, secrets being an extra charge, etc).
I resisted using them for a long time but it is really so convenient
Running your stuff, even private stuff, through a tunnel is great so that you don't have to expose your VPS' IPv4.
Their free tier for stuff like Workers and D1 is quite generous.
Workers have a nice and easy deployment model (when it's not broken) compared to AWS lambda, so I get why people are tempted. It's one simple file compared to 4 separate pieces of infra. But yes, please, use anything else that doesn't pay for the CloudFlare protection racket. For example there's https://bunny.net/edge-scripting/
Pages is a very convenient way of deploying static websites/SPAs with a generous free tier. You just need to find the tiny links in their dashboard to avoid accidentally using workers instead (which is supposed to supersede it but is clearly worse for this usecase).
i've done this several times recently
however now i just have agent do it with CLI and that works well and I don't have to find the secret link
The workers paid tier is $5/month and you can do a LOT with that. Once you drink the cloudflare kool-aid regarding workers they let you build very scalable apps while jumping through many fewer hoops than you would on AWS/GCP, at a fraction of the cost.
Workers is their version of Lambda
Workers gives me a free static site, just dropped the .html file there (or connect to git).
CDN, DDoS protection, excellent DNS hosting features, web monitoring, web analytics, advanced web and service filtering and blocking, zerotrust networking / vpn options, a solid API that works great with terraform, tons of other stuff.
Note - you should not be hosting purely static sites with Workers, if you can avoid it, give CF Pages is actually free and unlimited (assuming you don't use "Functions", which are just workers in disguise).
3 replies →
I suspect also to do with internal Slack etc. where employees vote on launch posts (a lot of them on HN since long). Not a scam or accusing anyone but this probably propels a lot.
Depending on what you do for work, you may be in that portal often (daily).