A recent thread about lemmy.world revealed that nobody knows where the servers are but that CloudFare, a US service is used. After going down a bit of rabbit hole (and not really understanding everything), this question popped up in my head.
It seems like all traffic to cloudfare is first send to the US, which seems dangerous…
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/managed-dns-providers I just don’t think they are free like Cloudflare.
Free? That’s weird. How do they make money? Does “free” just rope people in and make it harder to leave?
Cloudflare is in security business. They use all free users to generate traffic that comes to their network. They analyze that traffic and give ranks to user agents (IP plus some other factors).
Thanks to this they have superb WAF that is transparent for known „good user agents” like your mama who’s known for browsing some websites in their network. She’s showing a typical user pattern.
While your nerd friend who’s using a niche Linux browser will be considered low rank and presented with captcha way more often. Or simply blocked if he’s using a niche VPN on a known data center IP.
Cloudflare does a million things, some of them free to lure you in and then it’s easy to start paying them for their other convenient features, or maybe your size grows over Cloudflare’s free tier limits for some service.
Suddenly you’re paying cloudflare for some services, using others for free, and realize nobody else provides everything that cloudflare does, you’d have to use a bunch of different services.