Since announcing the move from Bunny.net to Cloudflare, I've received some feedback, both from customers and from the wider community. And I knew it was coming.
The concerns fall into two categories: Cloudflare's ethics as a company, and the fact that I'm now routing traffic through a US company.
I want to address both directly.
The ethics question
Cloudflare has a complicated history with content moderation. They've provided services to sites like The Daily Stormer, 8chan, and Kiwi Farms – platforms associated with hate speech, harassment, and in some cases, real-world violence. Their CEO, Matthew Prince, has described himself as a "free speech absolutist" and famously said after dropping The Daily Stormer: "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the internet. No one should have that power."
But here's the thing: this criticism applies to nearly every major infrastructure provider. AWS hosts plenty of questionable content. So does Google Cloud. So does Hetzner, where my actual servers live (in fact, Hetzner is one of the biggest sources of spam in the world – just check your web server logs and see who the IPs belong to that hammer your websites 24/7). The further down the stack you go, the harder it becomes to draw clean ethical lines.
Cloudflare isn't hosting my customers' content. They're not storing it. They're routing traffic and providing a firewall. The actual data – the posts, the images, the member information – stays on servers in Germany.
If I applied the standard of "never use infrastructure from companies with ethically questionable customers," I'd have to build my own data centres. And quite honestly, as fun as my home server project was, I would not want to do this on a bigger scale.
The sovereignty question
This one's more nuanced, and I take it more seriously.
Magic Pages has always positioned itself as EU infrastructure. Austrian company, German servers, European values around data protection. Now I'm routing traffic through a US company. Isn't that a contradiction?
Here's how I think about it:
What stays in the EU:
- All customer data (databases, uploads, content)
- Server infrastructure (Hetzner, Falkenstein and Nuremberg)
- Backups
- Business entity and billing
What goes through Cloudflare:
- Traffic routing (CDN)
- DDoS protection
- WAF (firewall)
Cloudflare caches content temporarily for delivery, but the source data – the database, the uploads, the member information – stays on my servers in Germany.
Is this a compromise? Yes. But the alternative was worse.
Bunny.net's WAF pricing would have meant spending roughly 30% of Magic Pages' revenue on WAF infrastructure alone – costs I'd have to pass on to customers. The other CDN providers I spoke with either couldn't solve the specific problem (Tor-based magic link spam abuse) or quoted similar prices that made the business unsustainable.
Cloudflare offered enterprise-grade protection at a price that lets Magic Pages continue to exist.
The real question
I think the underlying tension here is about purity versus pragmatism.
In an ideal world, I'd use a European CDN with a European WAF, run by a company with a spotless ethical record and reasonable pricing. That company doesn't exist, trust me. I looked.
So the question becomes: do I hold out for a perfect solution that isn't available, or do I make the best decision I can with the options in front of me?
I chose pragmatism. Not because I don't care about these issues but because I have 1,200 customers who need their sites to work, who need protection from spam attacks, and who are paying me to make these decisions on their behalf.
If a European provider emerges that can match Cloudflare's capabilities at comparable prices, I'll look at switching. I'd genuinely prefer that. But I'm not going to sacrifice the stability of Magic Pages on the altar of ideological purity.
I'm not pretending this is a perfect situation. I'm not going to tell you Cloudflare is a great company with values I admire. I'm not going to scrub "EU infrastructure" from my marketing, because the core of it is still true – your data lives in Germany, not San Francisco.
What I am doing is being honest about the trade-offs. You deserve to know what decisions I'm making and why.
If this is a deal breaker for you, I understand. I'll help you migrate to another provider. No hard feelings.
For everyone else: your sites are faster and better protected – for the same price. That's the outcome I was optimising for.
Questions? Just reply to this post or email me at [email protected].
About Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
I'm the founder of Magic Pages, providing managed Ghost hosting that makes it easy to focus on your content instead of technical details.
