Cloudflare provides many services, for example DDoS protection, CDN, and R2. If your site is using Cloudflare, there is no conflict between Paraxial.io and the Cloudflare services you need, because Paraxial.io is installed in your Elixir application code. You can continue using Cloudflare's services and Paraxial.io at the same time without any issue.
In 2017 a vulnerability in Cloudflare dubbed Cloudbleed exposed the private information of sites using Cloudflare, such as HTTP POST requests, passwords, and authentication tokens. If your website was using Cloudflare, the passwords and private access tokens of your users were exposed publicly. How is that possible? Cloudflare sits between your users and your website, with full access to all data that is encrypted in transit.
In comparison, Paraxial.io does not have access to your user's passwords at any point in time. A vulnerability in the Paraxial.io agent, or a compromise of the Paraxial.io backend, will not result in your user's passwords being compromised because they never touch our infrastructure. The Paraxial.io agent is open source, so you can verify this claim for yourself, and see exactly what data is being analyzed.
Here is a Cloudflare community post, Bots going “around” Cloudflare to heroku. What's happening? When you protect your server with Cloudflare, you are putting a Cloudflare server between your application and users:
user <-> Cloudflare Server (IP a) <-> Your Server (IP b)
All of Cloudflare's bot detection and prevention work happens on their server. However, if an attacker is able to determine your server's real IP address, they can send malicious requests directly to your server, bypassing Cloudflare. Paraxial.io's agent runs on your real server, at the Elixir code level, because it is not possible to bypass. Unlike Cloudflare, there is no server-in-the-middle that bots can route traffic around for attacks.
To put your site behind Cloudflare, you have to change your website's DNS settings. Changing these values is something site owners avoid doing at all cost, because it often leads to downtime, costing your business money. Cloudflare's own documentation states, "When you add your domain to Cloudflare, it may experience a brief period of downtime due to certificate issuance, misconfigured Cloudflare settings, or limitations at your origin server."
With Paraxial.io, the only change is to your Elixir application code. There is no risk of downtime at all due to DNS settings, and during a bot attack Paraxial.io can be deployed faster than Cloudflare.
When you use Cloudflare, your website becomes totally dependent on their infrastructure. This means an additional dependency in your software, where a 3rd party's outage affects your business. With Paraxial.io, in the unlikely event the Paraxial.io backend service has an outage, your application will continue to function as normal, because the agent fails open.
A significant part of the entire internet is centralized on Cloudflare today. When Cloudflare has an outage, it makes the news because so many websites stop working. They have the ability to access the private data of millions of users, as seen during the Cloudbleed incident. When you use Cloudflare, all of your customer's private data is shared with them.
Paraxial.io is a bootstrapped company that deeply values privacy, transparency, and an independent internet. We cannot spy on your user's private keys and passwords because we don't have access to them. This is for the maximum security and privacy of our customers. By using Paraxial.io, you are supporting an independent business and a better internet.
When you use Cloudflare, the company now has full control over your website. They can take your business offline with no warning, access your user's private data, and make the decision if you can conduct business today.
With Paraxial.io, we understand the importance of independent businesses, and believe that you should remain in control of your website. We do not have access to your user's private data, we cannot kick you off the internet, and our agent is fully open source, so you can verify these claims yourself at any time.
Paraxial.io is a fully bootstrapped business, we have not taken any venture capital funding, and make a product that serves the Elixir community. We love Elixir, and want to see Elixir developers and businesses using the language succeed. Cloudflare is a massive company with numerous controversies in security, privacy, and policy that has to act in the interest of shareholders before customers.