Ryan Wild
I am suddenly really glad I never re-enabled #cloudflare proxying for my Mastodon sites...
Dec 5 at 9:04amWeb
Show threadDjembro, RO, supports 🇺🇦🇬🇪Dec 5
@wild1145
I, too, am glad you didn’t reenable CloudFlare, but what was your reasoning at the time? Just curious. A recent CloudFlare outage messed up a purchase of mine and I started thinking having so many sites dependent on CloudFlare wasn’t such a good idea.
Show threadRyan WildDec 5

@djembro There's a lot of stuff the free tier does that "Just works", their DDoS protection, Bot protection and what used to be pretty good global caching and CDN meant when I first ran MastodonApp.UK and later took over Universeodon.com I was able to provide faster page loading and a more responsive experience for everyone and a lot of the alternatives especially in the CDN / caching space can get very expensive very quickly and the network we originally used was a bit hit and miss.

Honestly I wasn't actually expecting the performance routing directly to our new infrastructure to be as good as it has been and if we end up with another influx in users similar to when the sites launched it might not actually sustain 80k people per site in the same way CF let us do.

The reality is CF does offer a pretty good product for free and there aren't any real good cheap or free alternatives out there because it's expensive to operate such a network.

Show threadRyan WildDec 5
@djembro Part of what I really want to focus on over the next year or two is reducing / removing dependencies on hardware and infrastructure we don't control and maintaining the higher levels of resilience and reliability we get from depending on these services. E-mail is probably the one exception to that rule because it's such a pain to get done well and if that's my only external dependency for $1/$2 a month then I can live with that but it's also expensive and requires a lot of up front investment to do and for everything I manage myself it costs more time and money to maintain and setup in the first place.
Show threadJdeBPDec 5

@wild1145

!

#BowlOfPetunias #Agrajag

Show threadwDec 6

@wild1145 I’m glad you understand this because I don’t.

And thank you for running MastodonApp.UK. I appreciate all the work you do and I’m sure the other people on it feel the same.