It seems like everyone is talking about Cloudflare, and I know plenty of developers who use it in their projects. I couldn’t resist the hype, so I decided to try it out for myself.
I have to admit, I’m not impressed. For a relatively simple setup, it mostly adds complexity. It feels like you’re signing up for a gateway drug: once you’re in, you’re constantly nudged toward buying “optimizations” like their image optimizer, which strikes me as a clumsy, band-aid solution to a problem that should be handled at the application or build-process level, not by a middleman CDN.
The core service works, but the constant upsell and added layers of abstraction make me question whether the trade-off is worth it for anything but the most massive, attack-prone sites.