The nameservers of brainbaking.com have changed, from Cloudflare back to my trusty local hosting/domain provider. Since the DDoS attack of last year, I moved the nameserver to Cloudflare to more resiliently catch dumb fuckups of people with questionable ethical motivations, as Cloudflare does a couple of things for you out of the box: it uses an Anycast DNS system, it hides the IP address of your server, it caches partials, and it logs visits.

So why change it back? My provider told me they've also set up systems to provide resilience, yet my naive * subdomain A-type DNS record provided easy access for attackers to spam at full force. I don't need that subdomain, it just made the Let's Encrypt automatic certification process a bit less painful every time I require a new one. So I got rid of it.

I don't need Cloudflare's caching mechanism---it seems to only cache at peaks that only happen if a post makes it into Hacker Newsletter which isn't something I care for. Read Matthew Graybosch's Hacker News, Again why he thinks HN is "a venture capital company's fan club" (judging from the intellectual level of the comments on my posts, I agree).

So what if a huge peak makes the site go boom? It's a personal one run on a tiny server that I manage myself. I like to think of my websites as a tiny part of a huge distributed network. The more traffic routed through Cloudflare's system, the more centralized instead of distributed the internet becomes, which sounds worrying instead of reassuring.

Looking at Cloudflare's 2023 Year in Review, it's safe to say they've become alarmingly huge. They process 50 million HTTP(S) requests and 70 million DNS requests per second. Not only their services, but also their tendency to analyze everything that passes through is big business. "Google Analytics, React, and HubSpot were among the most popular technologies found on top websites." Okay, great trend?

It's very difficult to get an overview of how big Cloudflare actually is. How much of the internet flows through them? The biggest giants (Netflix, X, Zoom, Vimeo, etc) use it as a reverse proxy service according to W3 Techs, meaning 19.1% of all websites! In 2021, according to a tweet of an employee, that's 20%.

A few memorable Cloudflare outages already proved what the result is of this centralization of network data flow. Guillome Garron echos my thoughts on the matter perfectly:

Yes, we have return to a small Internet, it is big in number of websites, pages, content and all the fiber optic cable linking those servers, actually Data Centers full of servers, full in turn of VPSs or Containers… But small in the number of owners of the infrastructure, even smaller that in the first days.

We are indeed putting all our eggs in too few baskets, ultimately risking losing freedom. I didn't completely realize this last year when I hastily switched over to avoid getting DDoS-attacked again, while all I should have done is remove the stupid * DNS entry.

Ideally, I'd even like to take this further and move my VPS to our home and run everything myself. There's something magical about virtual house visits. I'd more than happily take the risk of a higher latency and occasional outage into account. Some small personal websites are simply unavailable if there's too little sun, such as Low Tech Magazine:

This website runs on a solar powered server located in Barcelona, and will go off-line during longer periods of bad weather. This page shows live data relating to power supply, power demand, and energy storage.

I absolutely love that idea, although Brain Baking will probably be offline quite a bit more judging from the absence of a decent sun ray in the last few months here in Belgium...