Centralization is bad for everyone everywhere.
That bring said… I just moved my homeserver to another city… and I plugged in the power, then I plugged in the ethernet, and that was the whole shebang.
Tunnels made it very easy. No port forwarding no dns configuration no firewall fiddling no nothing.
Why do they have to make it so so easy…
That makes sense, except Google kinda does the same thing. Everything they have is technically just a “free tier” of the Google One subscription, right? I guess I’m saying that “free tier of paid product” doesn’t automatically qualify a company as trustworthy for me. Is there something else that sets Cloudflare apart?
For me personally, it was all about balance.
15 years ago, Gmail/Inbox was a great email client, the domain was great and popular (so no need to spell it out for people) and I would “pay” by getting ads based on my emails read by a bot.
Now Gmail is a terrible email client, the best updates are ridiculous things like moving buttons around and it takes Google years to roll out. The thing loses emails, mislabels and misclassifies stuff and the rules work for a week then blow up. On top of that, google is now basically a proctologist considering how far up my ass they want to go
The balance is broken… Google now officially sucks (IMO)
Well search and maps (and some others) have no paid tier. Even for paid products, google does quite explicitly make money from the free version through ads. And most google ads are through third party sites, so you can’t opt out of them by paying google.
In my opinion, the difference with Google is that Google is actively using your data and you’re giving them a lot of it. For Cloudflare, what do they have exactly? Depends on what services you use, but really all they get from me is the list of servers that connect to my domains. Google does that too if you use 8.8.8.8, or if you have any of their hardware that overrides router DNS settings like Chromecast and Google TV.
Quality of their products maybe? Cloudflare feels like they put a lot of effort into their product, Google not so much with how buggy everything is and how often they just abandon products they offer.