The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

I would love to get off Cloudflare but there are no real good alternatives

AWS is an alternative no?

AWS needs a dedicated AWS engineer while any technical person and some non-technical people have skill to set up Cloudflare. Esp. Without surprise bills.

Bankruptcy as a surprise gift is not an alternative. Even those that use big cloud providers like AWS and GCP use CDNs like Cloudflare to protect themselves. And there is no free CDN like Cloudflare.

Writing backends that can actually handle public traffic and using authentication for expensive resources are fantastic alternatives.

Also, cheaply rate limiting malicious web clients should be something that is trivial to accomplish with competent web tooling (i.e., on your own servers). If this seems out of scope or infeasible, you might be using the wrong tools for the job.

> And there is no free CDN like Cloudflare.

Their pricing page says:

No-nonsense Free Tier

As part of the AWS free Usage Tier you can get started with Amazon CloudFront for free.

Included in Always Free Tier

1 TB of data transfer out to the internet per month 10,000,000 HTTP or HTTPS Requests per month 2,000,000 CloudFront Function invocations per month 2,000,000 CloudFront KeyValueStore reads per month 10 Distribution Tenants Free SSL certificates No limitations, all features available

I always hear this, but honestly I'm not sure it's true.

It's hard to assess the validity of this versus Cloudflare having a really good marketing department.

I've used neither, so I can't say, but I've also never seen anyone truly explain why/why-not.

Why not use both and find out? Cloudflare is much less technical than AWS, but still a bit technical.

1 TB per month of data is literally nothing. A kid could rent a VPS for an hour and drain all that. What do you do after that? AWS is not going to stop your bill going up is it?

I don't care about any of those fancy serverless services. I am just talking about the cheapest CDN.

You still have the network traffic issues which is very substantial

Even if you write the best backend in the world where do you host them? AFAIK Cloudflare is the only free CDN.

> Included in Always Free Tier

> 1 TB of data

Someone can rent a 1Gbps server for cheap (under $50 on OVH) and pull 330TB in a month from your site. That's about $30k of egress on AWS if you don't do anything to stop it.

This sounds pretty unrealistic: the web is not better off if the only people who can host content are locking it behind authentication and/or have significant infrastructure budgets and the ability to create heavily tuned static stacks.

We were supposed to pentest a website on AWS WAF last week. We encountered three types of blocks:

1) hard block without having done any requests yet. No clue why. Same browser (Burp's built-in Chromium), same clean state, same IP address, but one person got a captcha and the other one didn't. It would just say "reload the page to try again" forever. This person simply couldn't use the site at all; not sure if that would happen if you're on any other browser, but since it allowed the other Burp Suite browser, that doesn't seem to be the trigger for this perma-ban. (The workaround was to clone the cookie state from the other consultant, but normal users won't have that option.)

2) captcha. I got so many captchas, like every 4th request. It broke the website (async functionality) constantly. At some point I wanted to try a number of passwords for an admin username that we had found and, to my surprise, it allowed hundreds of requests without captcha. It blocks humans more than this automated bot...

3) "this website is under construction" would sometimes appear. Similar to situation#1, but it seemed to be for specific requests rather than specific persons. Inputting the value "1e9" was fine, "1e999" also fine, but "1e99" got blocked, but only on one specific page (entering it on a different page was fine). Weird stuff. If it doesn't like whatever text you wrote on a support form, I guess you're just out of luck. There's no captcha or anything you can do about it (since it's pretending the website isn't online at all). Not sure if this was AWS or the customer's own wonky mod_security variant

I dread to think if I were a customer of this place and I urgently needed them (it's not a regular webshop but something you might need in a pinch) and the only thing it ever gives me is "please reload the page to try again". Try what again?? Give me a human to talk to, any number to dial!

If it were this easy, we wouldn't have had about 10 HN posts on the topic in the last few months.

Shouldn't this be seen as success? You weren't a normal user, you were trying to penetrate the site, and you got a bunch of friction?

On the first fricking pageload I got blocked and couldn't open it at all, no captcha shown. That's a success only insofar as you want to exclude random people who don't have a second person whose cookie state to copy

Also mind that not every request we make is malicious. A lot of it is also seeing what's even there, doing baseline requests, normal things. I didn't get the impression that I got blocked more on malicious requests than normal browsing at all (see also the part where a bot could go to town on a login form while my manual navigation was getting captchas)

I hear you, but I find it suspicious. I mean CloudFront is used by over 10% of all CDN content online, and is used by Amazon itself.

It wouldn't just randomly block something.

It must be based on something no?

Ah, for cheapest CDN, maybe you're right. I think BlazingCDN can also be cheap, but CLoudFlare might be the best deal. OP didn't really say there wasn't any cheaper alternative, just said "no real good alternatives".

True, CloudFlare DDoS protection is unmatched, they just eat the cost for free.

Some websites will detect a Burp proxy and act accordingly. If you did your initial page load with any kind of integration like that, that's why the WAF may have blocked your request. I don't know exactly how they do it (my guess is fingerprinting the TLS handshake and TCP packet patterns), but I have seen several services do a great job at blocking any kind of analyzing proxy.

The technical skills of the majority of the HN community are way below those of the typical computing community a generation ago.

I thought the whole point of paying a fortune for AWS was to avoid having a dedicated engineer. It’s the cobol of the 21st century.

GitHub pages?

You can't pipe any media files from any origin to GitHub Pages.

There are many free static site hosts but not many free CDN.