Comment by Afforess

I love a good pitchfork and torch session as much as the next rabble-rouser, but let's remember Cloudflare got popular because they _solved*_ a hard problem: how to deal with a DDOS, as a small or medium size website. Cloudflare's essentially a for-profit insurance pool for bandwidth. No individual site has enough bandwidth to handle a DDOS, nor can afford it, but pooled together, many sites can afford a service that can handle individual DDOS attacks. Even if you want to solve the problem without a profit-motive, you still end up with a solution that is going to look very similar to Cloudflare.