Switching away from Cloudflare (which ebid.net is currently hosted on)

[stopusingebay]

Most people likely don't know what Cloudflare is. Have you ever had to solve a Capcha by clicking on images of cross walks or bicycles to be able to access a website? Then you've experienced what Cloudflare does, or at least part of the good side of it. They are an Internet reverse proxy provider that protects your website from abuse, often for free, in exchange for sending all of your visitors' data through them. If you don't know what a proxy is, just think of Cloudflare as in Internet hosting company. Here are some things to consider:

1) Just because a company is big doesn't mean it is infallible. Some of the biggest corporations have had data breaches where millions of customer passwords and payment details were stolen.

2) All encrypted data (meaning secure https:// websites) are intercepted by Cloudflare, so end to end encryption is broken. Cloudflare requires that your website either uses Cloudflare's SSL certificate, or that the private key from the site's certificate is given to Cloudflare so that they can decrypt encrypted data. This means that Cloudflare can intercept and even modify data going to secured websites, even when the certificate appears to be completely legitimate.

3) Cloudflare is gaining Monopoly status, and they are partnered with Google. When you do an Internet search, it's not uncommon for half of websites in the search results to be behind Cloudflare. These big companies don't want websites like ebid.net to exist. Big tech in the US has teamed up and they are making a lot of progress consolidating what most people do in to just a hand full of companies. The purpose of ebid.net is to break away from these companies, not sell out to them. There are other smaller CDNs and services out there that protect sites from denial of service attacks and other abuse. They're not free though, and there is a good reason for why they're not free. Perhaps interests that support Google and the consolidation of the Internet are BEHIND these DDoS attacks, such as the one that ebid suffered from a while back. The website owner then signs up for the free Cloudflare protection plan, the DDoS attacks are ended, but now all of their once encrypted data is being harvested by Cloudflare.

4) When something is free it often ends up being so that they can take advantage of their users later, if not currently. It's important to think about why a company is offering something for free. Are they covering their expense by harvesting data from their users? Are they planning a big vendor lock in scheme where it will no longer be free at some point, and users will have difficulty moving away?

5) Cloudflare usually forces javascript on all visitors to the site. No big professional sites like Amazon or Facebook use Cloudflare. Actually they're big enough to run their own CDNs. Forcing javascript on site visitors prevents crawlers and some search engines from harvesting data off of your site. If you're a merchant site, you want crawlers to scrape your site and post it on their site, since it's free advertising for you.