I recently stumbled across Cludflares trustpilot page and the reviews were completely mismatched from the way I have experienced people talk about them on forums. The reviews on trustpilot make them sound awful, but I have only seen recommendations for them on forums, often people say they are the best DNS provider.
Whats up with that? Does anyone know why there is such a disparity.
I imagine trustpilot is where people go to vent about bad service because it’ll come up when you search for cloudflare reviews.
true, but I don’t think it’s that alone, there are lot of other providers on there that don’t get anywhere near the same number of bad reviews or intensity of reviews as CF. There are people really hating on CF there.
I can’t remember exactly, but there was some shit going on with contract terms or monopolistic market behavior or something.
That’s the only criticism I’ve seen that was somewhat credible tho.
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1d14rb7/cloudflare_took_down_our_website_after_trying_to/ is the most recent Cloudflare drama. They’ve been known to fuck customers before but I can’t really find specific examples. Obviously their protection can also be overzealous and block legitimate traffic too, which pisses off users as well.
Beyond that there’s many more philosophical reasons to hate Cloudflare - they’re a highly centralised point of failure and like in the story linked above could at any time “alter the deal”, so to speak. As an advocate for the free and open internet I wouldn’t consider them a force for good any more than Google, Facebook or Amazon.
They’re also hated for blocking privacy tools like Tor and blocking scraping, which does suck, but if cloudfail doesn’t work anymore you can still always search SHODAN for website title/headers to see if the LB is accessible directly via the internet. DNS management at medium sized corpos is usually a clusterfuck so it’s definitely a non-zero chance.
As an advocate for the free and open internet I wouldn’t consider them a force for good any more than Google, Facebook or Amazon.
They’re not only a centralised point of failure, but also a man-in-the-middle for so many sites that they can effectively track people all over the internet through web and DNS requests, and fingerprint browsers through CAPTCHA scripts, and even read people’s HTTPS traffic.
I consider them a hostile actor.
the most recent Cloudflare drama.
It was made up by a shitty illegal crypto casino:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41091144They’ve been known to fuck customers before but I can’t really find specific examples.
Of course you can’t find specific examples because they are known to be great with customers.
some people like them and others don’t… both have their own reasons… not sure what other info you are looking for?
A lot of the work they do is aimed at thwarting the business models of cyber criminals, scam sites, etc.
Their reviews are probably from the people who had a good thing going using bots to scrape PII or take advantage of free trials/free tier SaaS products but were suddenly put out of business by cloudflares captcha tools.
