Dusk Hosting Blog

Heads up - this is going to be a fairly opinionated article. The views expressed in this article are purely those of the writer, and there is some content towards the end of this article that may make the reader uncomfortable. Some discretion advised.

What is Cloudflare?

I'm willing to bet most of you have, at the very least, heard the name Cloudflare - but in case you didn't know, they provide domain and DNS services, as well as protection and content delivery to a large amount of websites throughout the internet - in fact, it's estimated that around 20% or more of global internet traffic passes through Cloudflare. Needless to say, they aren't exactly a small provider.

It's also worth noting that they are not a direct competitor to Dusk Hosting, but as mentioned before they do offer domain registrar services as well as various cloud and network security services.

That all being said, there are a few things you should consider before putting your eggs in the Cloudflare basket:

Consider your needs...

One of the biggest things I would say, if you are going to just be running one or two websites and want to keep things simple, utilizing Cloudflare is likely going to be a bit overkill. 

No such thing as "Free"

As of the time of writing, Cloudflare offers a "Free Tier" of services that includes limited, basic access to DDoS Protection, basic WAF, E-Mail Routing, as well as various other products. But, as we've seen throughout the history of the world, there's no such thing as free. In the history of the internet especially, free services eventually being axed and either becoming paid or being removed altogether is not uncommon.

This is fine for some services, but is a bad place to be in if you end up setting up a complex network or system with the free services Cloudflare offers. There may not be an easy way out if, and I would argue most definitely when, these "free" services are no longer free.

One of the biggest things you have to watch out for is company buy-outs, this is one of the most common reasons for major restructurings, this has happened to many companies in the past, Sun Microsystems, Wave, LogMeIn, just to name a few are companies that have had major pricing changes to their free services after acquisitions by another brand. Even if Cloudflare manages to remain independent indefinitely, a change in leadership could result in the same outcome. 

A Dangerous Position

Another thing worth potential concern is Cloudflare's dangerous position in the market, and how transparency has not always been their strong suit - there is another article that goes way more in depth into this than I will here, but Cloudflare is in an especially unique place in the Internet Market. As we discussed before, 20% of internet traffic globally through their networks.

This position comes with two major caveats the way I see it. The first is that because so many services and pieces of the internet rely on Cloudflare, an outage of any of their services (like the DNS Outage that occurred recently on July 14, 2025) has the potential to render many pieces of the internet inoperable. The second is that they have massive power to deplatform or terminate the services of customers relatively arbitrarily.

Politics... no, not those politics.

Cloudflare has been known to have protected or provided services to some pretty objectively awful sites, including sites that were used facilitate severe harassment campaigns and doxxing against people. Most notably, Kiwi Farms and The Daily Stormer. In the Kiwi Farms case, Cloudflare originally defended their position and claimed they would continue to provide services to Kiwi Farms, only taking action after severe backlash from online groups.

To be fair, Cloudflare is far from the only to come under scrutiny for the websites they've served, or failed to serve - OVHCloud was known to be hosting Islamist "Jihad" content for a long time before responding to requests to take it down. Amazon Web Services (AWS) decided to take down "Parler", a Social Media platform, because of it's political views.

I'm all for free speech, I really am - but there is a point where words have actions that can lead to people getting hurt in person, and such situations need to be handled with some level of discretion. 

Why I wrote this article

I'd like to bring up the primary reason that led me to write this article. I was recently made aware that Cloudflare is currently, at the very least, providing DNS Services for a notorious online site that has horrific imagery of real-life gore, including images of abused children and more things that I absolutely don't care to get into here - I won't name the site for obvious reasons but the domain was registered in 2016 and the nameservers currently point to Cloudflare.

I can't imagine that Cloudflare has not received many complaints about this website, but they clearly have not taken action against the services provided for this site at the time of writing. It is worth noting that if DNS is the only service they are providing, this does not mean Cloudflare is directly hosting the content on this site, but they are still directly providing network routing throughout the internet that allows people to visit it.

This, at the very least, should raise some extremely serious and unsettling questions as to Cloudflare's enforcement policies and the apparent lack of transparency at their organization. 

When might Cloudflare be right for you?

Now, there may be some instances where Cloudflare might be right for you - if you are the owner or operator or a large company or enterprise Cloudflare has many Enterprise Solutions that might be right for you, or if you have a need to have many networking services tightly integrated -- You are a lot less likely to have the rug swept out from under you as a paying customer, although keep in mind pricing is a factor and not all services have transparent pricing.

Some Alternatives to Cloudflare Services

There are alternatives to some of Cloudflare's most popular Services, and, these are purely my own recommendations and are biased - you may find others that suit your needs better: 

• Domain Registrars:
  • NameSilo
  • Namecheap
  • Your Hosting Provider may also resell domains (such as we do)
• DNS: 
  • Your Registrar
  • Your Hosting Provider (such as us)
  • Microsoft Azure (for mission critical DNS)
  • ClouDNS (for mission critical DNS)
• Website Security: 
  • Path.net (DDoS Protection)
  • Cosmic Guard (for cost-effective DDoS Protection)
  • Microsoft Azure (for large business / enterprise protection)
  • Immunify 360 (Linux Web Server Security, Self hosted/managed)
  • Your Hosting Provider, which may provide a combination of these services or similar (such as we do)

Conclusion

I'd like to end this by saying that, as I mentioned in the beginning, this is an opinionated article, although I have done my best to add facts and links to things where I saw relevant. The main takeaway is that you should be cautious when looking at Cloudflare for a number of reasons, but really, for those same reasons, you should look into any major company you do business with, especially one that represents you in your online presence. 

I hope you found this article informative, and I welcome any feedback you may have.