They may be distinguishing them based on their type of customer, rather than their quantity of traffic. Other CDNs may tend to exclusively pursue much larger customers like big banks, governments, etc., while Cloudflare from my understanding is quite happy to serve the smaller market segment.
I always feel that Cloudflare makes the right decisions and wonder what the critics are worried about. Is the criticism is that they are just too darn big?
Our there any other nuanced opinions?
Secondly doesn't an entity have to have a certain amount of internet traffic to even consider a CDN.
My point of view is that large commercial entities need CDNs small time people can get by with the ip provided by the ISP.
I feel like Cloudflare is becoming more of a cloud computing platform with a focus on global "instant" delivery of services than a CDN company.
Of course, they're also a really competent CDN company, but they're really leveraging all their experience in that domain to bolster up their compute offerings.
You could say the same thing about any CDN - Cloudfront, Fastly, Akamai, etc.
Is it right to say that the only reason Cloudflare is the forefront of this concern is because of their business model of offering the CDN for free, while the others have a much more limited free tier or service or none at all?
I've always thought of cloudflare as a plan to centralize the traffic that is not large enough to warrant their own CDN. All the examples you mentioned run their own content delivery in some way.
IMO cloudflare represents the death of the small player on the public internet, before it most small players ran their own internet-facing services, with it many choose to just run behind cloudflare.
Reducing CloudFlare to a CDN is a disservice. They have some amazing services like Bot Management and Workers that make them very appealing. The CDN is just a nice bonus.
Seems like strong competition to Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/). Always thought that was their greatest risk, someone with a huge, worldwide, already paid for CDN stepping in an offering the same service.
They still have the statistics and security features going for them, though...
There are other large CDNs like Akamai. They just don't compete with Cloudflare in the consumer sector. It probably doesn't matter for them because enterprise contracts are where all the money is at.
Regardless of this bug or their business practices, this is why Cloudflare has gotten so big. They have a much better pricing model compared to other CDNs.
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