cloudflare

the world's largest cybersecurity company, founded in july 2009 by matthew prince, michelle zatlyn, and lee holloway. matthew prince still serves as ceo at the company, while michelle zatlyn serves as president and coo. lee holloway, who initially built and coded cloudflare's entire architecture by himself, had to leave the company in 2016 because of illness.

people think cloudflare is just a simple thing that provides ddos protection, but it's actually not like that. apart from ddos protection and dns routing, they offer hundreds of services. as was written in the entry earlier, cloudflare has no competition. 25-30% of all the sites on the internet use cloudflare. there's an incredible monopolization going on. but honestly, i haven't seen cloudflare abuse this enormous monopoly power so far. for instance, they provide their ddos protection and bot blocking services completely free. there are very few sites on the internet that do this completely free. i'm someone who's been using cloudflare for years, i use it on all my sites, but i haven't paid a single penny so far. they also do the caching of your static files (css, js, images) on a global cdn network and the ssl certificate completely free. on top of that they offer a completely free email forwarding service too.

this situation seems surprising to me. like i said above, a firm this monopolized offering free services like this and being user-friendly seems interesting to me. these days every website forces you to take out a monthly subscription even for the tiniest task.

if you say "doesn't cloudflare charge anything at all, brother?", of course they have paid plans, but these are more for large-scale websites rather than individual users.

in my opinion the worst part of their monopolization is that if something happens to them one day, half the internet will straight-up disappear. it already crashes from time to time and we see what happens.