If you’re familiar with the network infrastructure side of the internet, you know that most of the web runs on AWS and Cloudflare. They’re titans of the industry because they’re exceptional at what they do and they make it easy on the users that need their services to get it at a world-class level.
They’re so good that a huge portion of the web that we use today relies on them. It’s quite impressive how a single datacenter like US-East-1 by AWS can handle over a quarter of the major sites on the internet. But that doesn’t come without potential problems.
Avoiding Centralization
Quick, what’s your email provider? Is it Gmail? 85% of you use it in some capacity, most as your main email. To be fair, it’s understandable. Gmail integrates with all sorts of services you use on a daily basis and has an oh so convenient spam filter.
A lot of web infrastructure behind the services we’re so used to on the internet operate the exact same way you do with Gmail. Cloudflare and AWS especially compose huge chunks of the internet services we use from professional collaboration tools, to reddit posts, or even payment services and banking.
Prime Targets
A major problem we have with having so few service providers is that the more people use them, the juicier those providers are as targets for malicious actors.
Sure, you’re a small to medium business most people wouldn’t bother trying to hack. But when you’re sharing the same servers as a major service, you share their risks and suddenly you risk your service going down because some malicious actors wanted someone else’s service to go down. Doesn’t seem right or fair does it?
Being Online When Competitors Aren’t
In recent memory, GCP, AWS and Cloudflare have all have massive outages taking down huge portions of the internet. Errors happen, it’s not like they only happen at big companies. But when a mistake happens at a massive tech company, it often takes hours to solve because it’s affecting so many different services around the world. When you’re dealing with a focused company, the outages are often faster because they know where the problem likely came from and who made the mistake.
For all of these big outages, our customers have stayed online throughout. It’s not because we’re better than them, we just eliminated as much room for error that was out of our hands as possible.
reminder days like today are exactly why you SHOULD deploy on us-east-1
— dax (@thdxr) October 20, 2025
everything is down for your customers they don't blame you
when us-east-2 goes down they blame you
Obviously the above post by Dax is humorous but it cuts to a deep point, most of the people holding up your internet infrastructure cares more about shifting the blame than they do about fixing or avoiding problems. It’s human nature of course, but why are you paying the big bucks for average behavior?
Unlike our competitors, we’d rather take the blame for something being down than point fingers. Sure, it means we have awkward situations but we’re never sitting around twiddling our thumbs when there’s an issue with your service. We’re on it because your success is our success. That’s what you pay us for right?
Giving You a Better Price
Cloudflare and AWS are exceptionally good at scaling with you. Need 1000 servers in the next 3 minutes? AWS has you covered. This is an incredible value for your venture capital funded business that’s expanding at breakneck speeds, not so much for you and I.
But most of us just need a solid server (or a slice of a server) that just works fast and reliably. There’s plenty of providers out there that can do just that without relying on major infrastructure that will likely take you down with them if they have issues.
Closing Thoughts
In the end, you’re not exactly doing the wrong thing by going with the most popular options. If anything it’s a nice experience, the only problem is that you end up tied to everyone else’s risks and liabilities. Is that something worth it for you? Or would you rather just have a provider that works around the clock in a more personal manner?
If you wish to take a more resilient and less centralized way of hosting your site, give us a try or contact us for more information.