Nearly 9 in 10 European companies using a CDN rely on Cloudflare
Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
An analysis of 44,143 European companies with a detected CDN finds that 89.6% use Cloudflare, far ahead of Amazon (3,112), Fastly (1,299), and Akamai (396). The concentration varies by country, from 95.6% in the Netherlands to 78.8% in Spain and Ireland. The article warns that such market dominance turns routine internal errors at Cloudflare into continent-wide outages, citing three recent incidents. It also notes the measurement covers only the front door, not data residency, and explains how to check your own site's CDN.
When one provider fronts most of a market, its mistakes stop being its own problem and become everyone's, at the same time.
- jillesvangurp
It's seriously good value for small websites. Basically, there is no cost aside from the domain. And for registering and managing domains, they are pretty much the most affordable option as well. And they have a few other things that aren't half bad to use with pretty generous freemium layers.
We used Google's CDN for the last six years or so but it's pretty annoying to deal with and you have to pay for a load balancer every month in order to properly use it. That adds up to quite a bit per year. Even if all you are doing is routing domains to some bucket with a website.
We migrated most of our gcloud stuff to Hetzner beginning of the year. That left a load balancer and a few static websites hosted in Google buckets. I migrated all of that to Cloudflare just a few months ago.
I still have a few buckets in gcloud proxied via a vm in hetzner with a proxied domain in Cloudflare. Not the most elegant route but it works. I might optimize some of that later. At this point, we pay for some Google buckets and not much else in gcloud.
Honestly, Google and AWS need to start paying attention to Cloudflare more. Their complexity is chasing people towards Cloudflare. The hoops you have to jump through with both of them to host a simple website with their CDNs is embarrassing. I've gone through the process with both of them. Although my experience with Route53 is a bit stale at this point. On Cloudflare, getting an new website up and running with a freshly registered domain takes only a fe […]
- noir_lord
Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue...
Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months.
Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier.
Personally I think we absolutely should, I just don't think we will.
Barring them doing something so egregiously awful we don't have the choice, Governments can move fast when they want to but efficient government scares the shit out of me because it rarely happens outside of a genuinely serious crisis.
- thih9
What are some EU based alternatives?
Edit: I found https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare , which lists among others: https://bunny.net/ , https://www.keycdn.com/ , https://blazingcdn.com/ , https://www.myrasecurity.com/en/product-content-delivery-net..., https://www.leaseweb.com/cdn . If anyone has any personal experiences with any of these please share.
- cbg0
> The front door is not the whole stack
Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN?
On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to help keep you online and now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business.
- 8by3
When someone says cloudflare is too good / cheap to be true... maybe think about it.
They have shareholders, who wouldn't allow them to provide value for free, its just not obvious to you how they are extracting that value. Maybe its by capturing a huge % of unencrypted https traffic because if you let them do your certs it means they can read all your real traffic.
- 0trip
i just found out about cloudflare recently. And it is amazingly smooth compared with GCP and AWS
- Havoc
Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there
- pjmlp
The problem is that we have spent 40 years adopting US technology, across multiple generations of software developers and decision makers, while everyone was supposedly on the same side.
It will take similar amount of years to go back into the cold war heterogeneous computing landscape of the 60, early 90s.
This assuming there would be an willingness across all European countries to actually push for that, and not jump out when it gets too hard and search for compromises instead.
This is why most sovereignty initiatives focus mostly on SaaS products and hardly on actual computing devices.
- maxcoding
I feel like your site needs a CDN, it takes over 40 seconds to load your front page from the EU.
- mitxela
People rarely reach for a CDN. They only ever reach for Cloudflare. Nobody's reaching for Akamai without a good sales pitch, nobody's tossing up between Akamai and Cloudflare, everyone's using CF because it's free. And they don't need the thing CF offers, they don't go out looking for it, it comes to them and they say "that sounds neat" and set it up.