Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

Before I went European sovereign for my own personal stack I used Cloudflare for hosting static and somewhat dynamic websites and it has become really nice the later years. There is almost no mention of "regions" in Cloudflare. Your content and code runs globally by default. With traditional clouds you need to think about how you distribute your application. At least that is my experience. Maybe they provide global CDN for global distribution of static content. But serverless containers and databases more or less run in a single region by default. And if you wish to distribute stuff it is on you to plan the architecture behind that.

Now stuff like Cloudflare D1, the distributed SQLite based database, have its limitations. Writes are directed to a specific datacenter/region behind the scenes, so some regions might get slower writes. But this is basically something that happens behind the scenes and just works. You need to think about where your primary base of customers live when you create the database, after that you don't think about regions. R2 (S3 compatible storage) just works globally as well.

A lot of what Cloudflare offers now feels like magic in a good way. I realize they don't have everything AWS, Google Cloud and Azure have. But they have enough that you can build serious systems on top of their infrastructure. They are no longer just a CDN/proxy provider. And their offering is seriously cheap.

The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers. Cloudflare is the LG TV of websites, but it's worse because we've known it has an always-on microphone and speech-to-text for over a decade and we still keep using it for some reason.

  > The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers.

Re: complexity. I used to find AWS unusable, then I realized I can just tell Claude Code or Codex to manage it. This makes it into an entirely different product, where "Cloudflare is easier" doesn't really matter. Now price is the only barrier.

I also believed that, but at least for India, this doesn't work in practice. Unless you atleast do the 25$ pro plan, cloudflare routes even india-to-india, hell, even mumbai-to-mumbai and aws_mumbai-to-cloudflare_mumbai traffic via Marsaille!! Not even Singapore. The unstated reason is that indian transit is expensive, though I fail to believe its cheaper to go from mumbai to marsaille and back to mumbai.

I am guessing the real reason (and at this point I am discounting incompetence - this has been true for years, so they are aware). You switch to the pro plan for the zone and everything now routes within india, 100s of milliseconds of latency saved.

Its even worse for workers and workers AI and embedding search. I found multiple seconds of latency, all vanishing the moment the zone is on pro plan (It seems R2, workers, workers AI - none of them are deployed in an India POP - unconfirmed, of course, cause there is no way to actually communicate with cloudflare).

Now 25$/month isn't much - though it does change calculations compared to "FREE!!" - but I would have liked to know this going in, instead of discovering this after having made the commitment. Seems like a deliberate dark pattern, to force people into the pro plan.

Shame, really - I love the CF stack(workers and DO are just so fantastic to build on), but these shenanigans, plus the utter refusal to provide ANY level of support, keep souring me on them.

yeah, I have been amazed at what I could do for free, and then amazed at how much more powerful it got for 5 bucks a months. Cloudflare is killing it in terms of value for small websites (and features and reliability).

> 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.

You don't need to register your domain with them. Only make their DNS servers your domain name servers.

>> US domination of "tech" is near total.

Not quite when considering China having the tech freedom they wanted. Also switching internet services is far easier than switching physical supply chains. The only thing that might be hard to switch is the part of the interent backbone infra that is controlled by USA.

Ironic that an article about a CDN was hugged to death. The free plan with a couple of caching rules could have sorted that.

lots of efficient government happens outside of a serious crisis, but then you don't notice it.

Yeah, I think only in crypto the non-us providers have a leg up, because running a node just needs an instance.

> 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.

You mean the US government working towards the interests of its people and economy? Which government wouldn't? It's kinda what we want it to do.

> 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.

It's not the so-called retaliation of the US government that leads to European inefficiencies like paying notaries thousands of euros to read out a contract to you (several discussions going around about this in Germany recently).

This is ultimately just a boogeyman. European governments love to blame someone else for their inefficient and bureaucratic processes that stifle innovation and are slowly becoming the laughing stock of the tech world.

If they really want a thriving tech industry, EU should:

- Normalize laws and regulations relating to commerce and online activities throughout the EU. Get rid of the notary crap. While you are at it, get rid of the impressum (why the fuck should I need to post my home address on my website?).

- Ensure that these normalized regulations are available in the tens of languages across the EU

- Invest heavily in telecom and data center infrastructure and software on a European-wide basis. The current AI bubble will see a downturn but data centers and connectivity infrastructure can be reused for EU-based cloud services.

- Invite the UK back in once they are an actual economic powerhouse that can speak with one voice.

Of course none of this will ever get done because EU bureaucrats would rather be in a perpetual hand-wringing mode while blaming the Big Bad US Boogeyman for all their problems.

> 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.

I'm thinking the opposite might be the way to go here.

We already know that "retaliation" comes from the US government regardless if you did something or not, so most of us (Europeans) have stopped pretending there is a way of preventing it.

Even more, if we piss off Trump enough, he might be dumb enough to try to block European access to CloudFlare, or something similar and maybe even dumber.

So with this, maybe the goal should actually be to try to piss off Trump and the US administration as much as possible, in order for them to start reacting and cutting off some stuff, so we (again, Europeans) basically gets forced off CloudFlare et al.

Lots of companies already finished moving away from storing their primary data in the US, lots of companies is in process of doing so (albeit some look like they'll take forever) but also lots of companies still aren't prepared for the future, would be nice if US government could make the decision a bit easier for them to make :)

> Personally I think we absolutely should, I just don't think we will.

I think many millions in the EU want to. The problem is that the current EU "politicians" are just US lobbyists. You can see it when Leyen signed the surrender treaty with her Overlord-buddy Trump. You can not fix the EU with such lobbiysts in place - and it's not just Leyen alone. Look at Merz - the guy basically is a tool used by US companies. He is not the brightest but very loyal to the USA. More than to the people who voted for him (and now curse themselves for having made such a big mistake).

Compared to the Spanish empire, Napoleon and Hitler the Americans are but whiny children. It would be one last hurrah for my country to break away.

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> now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business

You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires CDN and that somehow $200/month is a small amount of money for a small business.

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There are lots of companies that provide low end services for free to attract people who may now or in the future be decision makers at large companies.

I'm pretty sure it's not really any different from a protection scheme that turns into vendor lock in.

I tried them with our small company. They seem ... young. Support on discord is not something I can sell to our owners. We sent a ticket that activating some of their services instantly caused bad bots to scan our site, and never got a decent reply on that. Their attitude does not inspire confidence and for that reason we scrapped them as an option. Never actually found a good European option besides them, which is sad.

We use them en they have improved a lot in the last year. For edge services they have all the important thing like ddos protection and edge scripting. There is no replacement for Cloudflare Tunnel, but frp [1] is a good alternative.

We don’t miss Cloudflare one bit.

[1] https://github.com/fatedier/frp

They're fine for a CDN but overall their offering surprisingly immature IME. The devx for their hosted scripts/database just isn't there, and e.g. they only allow one global API key with full permissions, etc.

Like bunny.net - its still tiny compared to CF but hopefully they will grow and won't adopt the crappier bits of CF.

Something to consider if you're looking at Bunny.net: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710845

They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up.

I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.

Even if EU countries want to push for their own solutions, the biggest problem is the capital. The governments cannot fund this with tax payers money because they have other critical problems to solve and private companies only go far if they can make a profit.

Only time will tell how far this sovereign movement would go. Maybe when the US would have a president/government from the Democratic Party someday in the future. EU would cozy up again to US and go back to how things were. There’s no permanent enemies or allies when it comes to politics and at the end of the day it all revolves around money

The current Europe strategy seems to be to pay software engineers less money and hope for a superior product. I'm not sure how you'd catch up when some of your engineers literally make less than our fast food workers.

Maybe a European CDN, like Bunny (Slovenia)

Why not use cheap vps?

It will not get down with half of the internet the next time cloudflare has issues.

It's actually a great service though.

.. 9 out of 10 unhappy customers are currently unable to cause any blame, because they cannot even reach customer service because they are getting the "bot" treatment.

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> I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?

Maybe our countries are just small enough to not be overwhelmed by traffic? Most websites I've built and launched for Spanish national companies, that only have other Spaniards as users and customers, haven't needed any CDN at all, because you don't suddenly get 1K req/s. Meanwhile, launch a global website in English, that even get the slightest amount of popular, and all of a sudden you reach 1K req/s very quickly. Add on top that people usually don't even give two cents about performance, and adding CDN on top as a saving grace seems like an easy tradeoff.

So, why add a CDN when you don't need it? :) Probably 80% of everything I've ever deployed never needed a CDN in the first place, but I also save it as a thing in my toolbox to be used sparingly, rather than a default thing I slap on top of everything.

It’s a limitation of their dataset. If you take all domains, it definitely creates a different picture.

For both France and the UK, less than 15% of sites are behind a CDN. For both, around 95% use Cloudflare.

So in terms of percentages, there’s not much of a difference.

Their index being paywalled, it's not possible to answer about its content.

I wanted to check if the 5 customers for which I already did a change on their Cloudflare settings today where on the list, but can't do.

I'd be interested in what data they're using in the first place. It looks like their data is behind a paywall.

Also, funny that their page with for "Companies running Cloudflare" says there are only "887 European organisations using Cloudflare."

Looking back over the past 3-ish decades, becoming utterly dominant in some part of "essential" stuff on the internet has a way of paying off big.

Or, they discuss their free stuff at length here - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000147733326....

(That is Cloudflare's 10-K for calendar 2025 - scrutinized by serious investors, and with heavy penalties for lying.)

It depends on what you're trying to serve, but it's used to either save you money or as an insurance (or both). You don't need a CDN overall. But if you grow large enough, at some point you'll run into one of these three situations:

- Your public traffic costs you so much to repeatedly process that it's cheaper to let some service cache the common responses instead. (Where the cache size is larger than anything you'd want to support yourself. For example, if it's <1G and survives your service restarts, you may want to do it yourself)

- Your customers on the other side of the world start complaining that the resources take ages to load.

- Someone floods you with enough traffic that you can't respond to real customers traffic anymore. You get a ransom email to pay them to stop. But there are enough groups doing that that paying is useless because someone else will try again in a few days. If you're providing a service where people pay you to use the website, you're losing money until you solve this problem.

Reduces latency when the cached content is served from a local cdn pop, allows you to absorb some level of DDoS, can absorb traffic spikes more easily so infra can be more static, reduces load on server if assets are dynamically generated on the backend but can are cacheable, some senses can lead to simpler deployment as you serve assets from an object bucket, so no need to deal with keeping that data in your cluster, but that's minor. There are downsides too, cost, over caching, privacy/security perhaps too.

This article being down/slow is a great response.

Because an average request would have to travel half the globe, so setting up a simple HTTPS connection would already take a second. That's completely unacceptable for static content.

Not only would transfer be slow, they would also be much more pressing on the network as the request would occupy huge stretches and many interconnects and switches.

Furthermore, it hardens the website against DDoS and adds robustness for regional failures.

The site this is about is current down due to HN traffic.

Lol

Depends on your use case.

If you have a very inefficient backend (maybe legacy project?), you have massive amount of traffic (say 100K req/s or above) or you really must have sub-500ms latency absolutely everywhere in the world, then it might make sense to slap a CDN (or similar) on top of that.

In pretty much any case outside of that, it makes no sense to waste the time, money or effort on CDNs. But, all the CDN companies seemingly have convinced half the internet that you absolutely must use a CDN, otherwise you'll get hacked/broke/killed/sent to the moon, and they've been successful with this campaign too seemingly.

Depends how deeply integrated it is. Cloudflare offers a web application firewall that can quickly become complex, alongside features like custom routing rules, input parsing, custom headers, etc. As soon as you start integrating any of those into your environment, migration becomes more difficult fast.

How does that quip go again…there are only two difficulties in computer science, cache invalidation, naming things, and counting.

Going from one CDN to another can be infuriating even at a surprisingly small scale. Mostly (imo) from caching semantics and counting.

It's not really a commodity when Cloudflare is often cheaper, simpler and provides a better service compared to it's competitors.

For it to be a commodity there would be no good reason to pick Cloudflare over any alternative and this absolutely isn't the case.

But do they offer even 10% of the features Cloudflare offers to free customers? To imply that Cloudflare is merely a fancy CDN is to miss the whole point.

Unfortunately that one's on the operators. I can complain for days about CF, but nobody is forcing the companies to default to giving everyone a managed challenge page. Some do, because either they don't care or don't realise the extra cost.

Same but they're so much worse than cookie banners...

How did you extrapolate that leap of logic? Maybe we suck at business.

Do you mean US national security?

This has to be rage bait, right? Ever heard of GDPR? How about ICE?

Is it satire ? Laws apply to the publisher not to the TLS endpoint.

> This article is as useful as writing sky is blue.

Subtle

4edgy5me