I imagine trustpilot is where people go to vent about bad service because it'll come up when you search for cloudflare reviews.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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true, but I don't think it's that alone, there are lot of other providers on there that don't get anywhere near the same number of bad reviews or intensity of reviews as CF. There are people really hating on CF there.
Yeah they get a lot of users due to the free plans they offer, so I imagine there's just a lot of reviews as a result, both good and bad.
Also due to the free plan and being commonly used by home lab groups or small businesses, I think there are a lot of users that don't fully understand what they're getting into with CF and may be upset when they find out later on.
If you follow their ToS and understand what cloudflares proxy is doing to your traffic then it all works just fine.
Trustpilot in itself is a very problematic website as well that biases towards positive reviews. Companies can engage there and get reviews removed when the person won't further engage with the company that has wronged them and get the reviews removed. So if an organisation has bad reviews and its engaged on trustpilot they must be really bad.
I've heard they also removed good reviews if you don't pay them, so... yeah I don't think you can really learn anything from TrustPilot.
Cosmic balance, sort of 😅
Cloudflare is amazing , until it's not. Chances are you'll fall within the 95% that have a great time, but if for some reason you draw the ire of sales, engineering, or a system bug you're gonna have a bad time.
I can't remember exactly, but there was some shit going on with contract terms or monopolistic market behavior or something.
That's the only criticism I've seen that was somewhat credible tho.
I've used them as a proxy for a web app at the last place I worked. Was just hoping they'd block unwanted/malicious traffic (not sure if it was needed, and it wasn't my choice). I, personally, didn't have any problems with their service.
Now, if you take a step back, and look at the big picture, they are so big and ubiquitous that they are a threat to the WWW itself. They are probably one of the most valuable targets for malicious actors and nation states. Even if Cloudflare is able to defend against infiltration and attacks in perpetuity, they have much of the net locked-in, and will enshittify to keep profits increasing in a market they've almost completely saturated.
Also, CAPTCHAs are annoying.
some people like them and others don't... both have their own reasons... not sure what other info you are looking for?
Can't really defend CF. They are known to fuck with customers, break their promises and are not good for privacy.
A lot of the work they do is aimed at thwarting the business models of cyber criminals, scam sites, etc.
Their reviews are probably from the people who had a good thing going using bots to scrape PII or take advantage of free trials/free tier SaaS products but were suddenly put out of business by cloudflares captcha tools.