> the large DDOS your ISP can handle for you if you are willing to pay for it
That's exactly what people are paying Cloudflare for, because contrary to your local ISP they are actually competent at blocking a DDOS attack.
People use services like Cloudflare exactly because they don't want to spend a fortune on complex infrastructure just to deal with abuse. Even a mostly-static page running on a reasonably-specced server can easily be overwhelmed by an attack. Why spend $1000 / month on hardware when you can spend $100 / month on Cloudflare's protection?
> That's exactly what people are paying Cloudflare for
Cloudflare actually provides this service for free (for simple use cases at least).
I don't know how to come down on this issue. On one hand, I am against the centralization of cloudflare and the risks that come with it.
On the other hand, cloudflare allows almost anyone to set up a simple website and serve it to large numbers of people with very little resources/cost and advanced protection from DDOS attacks.
Similar mindset... also really intrigued with their developer tools as well. Workers, pages, D1, KV, etc. I was playing with a static site generator that deploys directly to a Cloudflare Pages setup, and it's lighning fast everywhere.
That's exactly what people are paying Cloudflare for, because contrary to your local ISP they are actually competent at blocking a DDOS attack.
People use services like Cloudflare exactly because they don't want to spend a fortune on complex infrastructure just to deal with abuse. Even a mostly-static page running on a reasonably-specced server can easily be overwhelmed by an attack. Why spend $1000 / month on hardware when you can spend $100 / month on Cloudflare's protection?