The cost of hosting a website or application can vary depending on several factors, including the amount of traffic the website receives, the amount of storage, compute power, type of hosting(shared, dedicated, VPS, etc), bandwidth required, and the level of security and support needed. Therefore, it is not always the case that a high traffic website will necessarily have a higher hosting cost.
Additionally, the profitability of a hosting service depends on the specific business model and pricing strategy of the company providing the service. Therefore, it is difficult to provide a general answer to the question of profitability without more information about the specific company and its operations.
I think Cloudflare actually paid for a large enough UI/UX team and took that seriously instead of the AWS model which is where UI/UX is done by application developers and then they maybe decide to fix the interface years later.
It's a real priority internally. As is accessibility. We want our product to be useable by the widest range of people and via APIs. And we want it to be easy to use.
If you want to use their "Access" or "Zero Trust" product from the main dashboard, I get about 8 redirects, ~12 seconds of delay and it launches a whole another bloated JS app which has different aesthetics, built by a separate team and has no relation to the main dashboard patterns.
They need to streamline their UI. There is much that needs to be done.
It's all products at the edge, as opposed to the other clouds where most of the products are delivered in big data centers. So unlike lambda where you have 20ish regions, you have 100s of POPs for cloudlare workers.
But because of that, I don't see how cloudlare can compete aggressively on price for things that don't need to be extremely close to the end user (IMO most things). Something's gotta give unless they have some incredible secret sauce.
A VPN should never be used for privacy unless you can prove they don't log, which is difficult. You would literally have to be in their datacenters and audit all their infra.
are we not mixing up private networks with user (consumer) privacy? not an expert by any means, but isn't VPN used exactly for creating non-public networks? e.g. when you log into your work network when WFH or connecting your branch office users to the head office servers and corporate applications...
Additionally, the profitability of a hosting service depends on the specific business model and pricing strategy of the company providing the service. Therefore, it is difficult to provide a general answer to the question of profitability without more information about the specific company and its operations.