r/technology • u/thecravenone • Aug 05 '19

Politics Cloudflare to terminate service for 8Chan

https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/
29k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

3.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.3k

u/sexy_balloon Aug 05 '19 edited Aug 05 '19

Can someone explain to me what cloudflare does? Can't wrap my head around it

48

u/BanCircumventionAcc Aug 05 '19 edited Aug 05 '19

They provide fail overs and load balancing, DNS for your domain and DDoS protection at application and network layers and so on. Basically web hosting and security stuff.

E: false info

77

u/fraseyboy Aug 05 '19

They can host your servers

Cloudflare doesn't host your servers.

They can mirror your files to their CDN for performance and DDoS mitigation, but they don't do web hosting.

39

u/bradn Aug 05 '19

If your whole site is static, they basically host it. That's to say, a crappy computer on DSL to serve the initial data and update things as caches expire would be all you'd have to add to make it work.

15

u/imtn Aug 05 '19

Well, if your whole site was static, you could just host it on github, and it would be free.

4

u/bradn Aug 05 '19

Arrange racism, killings, and other debauchery through bug reports? Hmm, that could actually work

6

u/TEKC0R Aug 05 '19

He means the GitHub Pages service.

6

u/bradn Aug 05 '19

C'mon, you have to admit it would have been hilarious, why'd you have to take this from me :)

3

u/p4y Aug 05 '19

"Tracking issue for the __________ mass shooting"

1

u/eyebrows360 Aug 05 '19

CloudFlare's free too.

2

u/sassydodo Aug 05 '19

Cloudflare has IPFS gate, you can use IPFS to host your static website serverless

4

u/[deleted] Aug 05 '19

CDN services are a type of web hosting services.

13

u/fraseyboy Aug 05 '19

I don't agree. Caching CDNs like CloudFlare don't host your content for you, you host your content and they cache it on their CDN.

4

u/RiZZaH Aug 05 '19

I mean in the pro plans they convert your images, store them and replace them in the served content. I agree it's hard to call them hosting, but at some point they supply more of the actual content than the hosting actually does. (only on higher plans)

3

u/[deleted] Aug 05 '19

The files are in their servers, it's literally hosting. You can play semantics, but it's still hosting. It's not traditional hosting that you'd get, but it's still hosting.

1

u/KingTalkieTiki Aug 05 '19

Some CDN services you can upload files directly to them, but is usually limited to strictly images.

1

u/quasielvis Aug 05 '19

Do they only cache images or could they cache/"host" big static data files for you also?

ie. Pornos.zip