Both Lemmy.world and my server rely upon Cloudflare for SSL, DDOS protection, CDN services, etc. I use it to provide me with a Cloudflare tunnel to get around not being able to forward ports.
Outages have put this dependance to question, and the same with recent news about the US government obtaining data through subpoenas. It’s a free service that takes care of many of the difficulties when it comes to hosting your service online, but everyone knows that free is not free.
What do you all think about Cloudflare?
Self hosting is why I use CF I like the tunnels for exposing myself to the internet.
Can’t you “just” set up
openvpnor something ? I’m not sure what CloudFlare tunnels do, I’m a bit of a control freak so delegating to CF always seemed like it’s against my principles or something x)(Genuinely curious, idk how that stuff works cause I never looked into it)
Fair question. It’s definitely within my ability to “just” swap to something else, I’d prefer something self hosted that’s foss. I will do it at some point, cf was a bit of a stop gap for me.
CF tunnels are similar to reverse proxies I believe. I started using their quick tunnels to expose things to the web and I found it very easy. A few things I wanted to host needed domains so I bought a domain from cf and get access to the permanent tunnels. Their tools are good and I know them from being the company that you call when you get ddos’d. I figured it would keep me safer while I was still figuring things out.
I feel like in my case I used them because of my ignorance. I know of openvpn i’ll look into it.