> Cloudflare has had some outages recently. However, what’s their uptime over the longer term? If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so.
Why is that the only option? Cloudflare could offer solutions that let people run their software themselves, after paying some license fee. Or there could be many companies people use instead, instead of everyone flocking to one because of cargoculting "You need a CDN like Cloudflare before you launch your startup bro".
What you’re suggesting is not trivial. Otherwise we wouldn’t use various CDNs. To do what Cloudflare does your starting point is “be multiple region/multiple cloud from launch” which is non-trivial especially when you’re finding product-market fit. A better poor man’s CDN is object storage through your cloud of choice serving HTTP traffic. Cloudflare also offers layers of security and other creature comforts. Ignoring the extras they offer, if you build what they offer you have effectively made a startup within a startup.
Cloudflare isn’t the only game in town either. Akamai, Google, AWS, etc all have good solutions. I’ve used all of these at jobs I’ve worked at and the only poor choice has been to not use one at all.
What do you think Cloudflare’s core business is? Because I think it’s two things:
1. DDoS protection
2. Plug n’ Play DNS and TLS (termination)
Neither of those make sense for self-hosted.
Edit: If it’s unclear, #2 doesn’t make sense because if you self-host, it’s no longer plug n’ play. The existing alternatives already serve that case equally well (even better!).
Why is that the only option? Cloudflare could offer solutions that let people run their software themselves, after paying some license fee. Or there could be many companies people use instead, instead of everyone flocking to one because of cargoculting "You need a CDN like Cloudflare before you launch your startup bro".