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

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.

> 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.

Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there

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.

I feel like your site needs a CDN, it takes over 40 seconds to load your front page from the EU.

Tale as old as time (or at least as the 1970s): nobody ever got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Cloudfare / AWS / Azure.

9 out of 10 corporate decisions are for blame avoidance / ass covering.

I'd also be interested in share of companies using a CDN in the first place. UK has 17k sites, while France and Germany, so countries with about equal and higher population than the UK, have only 4k and 6k sites behind a CDN.

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?

Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?

Europe sucks at tech?

Well I’ll be damned.

I would’ve never expected that.

Yeah because it's priced well and it works. It's a no-brainer. (Also if it does go down, well so has everyone else so no big deal)

Also in this list of GOATed companies: Tailscale, Ubiquiti.