Regardless of whether or not you provide your own SSL certificates, cloudflare still uses their own between their servers and client browsers. So any SSL encrypted traffic is unencrypted at their end before being re-encrypted with your certificate. How can such an entity be trusted?
A lot of people in this thread have never been ddosed and it shows. You don’t need to host a super popular thing to get ddosed.
When you host game servers there are gonna be salty 16 years old that go to a free stresser and hit you with 1gbps.
And you might think “well yeah but it’s not like cloudflare’s free plan protects that much”.
It does, believe me. I’ve done tests with people who have access to botnets and without cloudflare with 1gbps our connection was dead. With cloudflare it didn’t go down and reported more than 50gbps on the cloudflare dashboard.
Also another thing is that a lot of these people are 16 year old script kiddies, and not seeing your IP directly discourages them.
nginx can be configured to throttle connections and fail2ban to refuse them to mitigate this