I just don't understand why the operator, IANA, has to use Cloudflare for example.com
It cannot manage a one page website. WTF
There are no page "aseets", no need for images, CSS, etc. It was a text-only website to test connectivity
iana.org forwards to Cloudflare, too
Fortunately the FTP server service still works
Without assistance from a third party
If it's been a sensible decision to use Cloudflare for some period of time then why did IANA wait until now
(Yes, I know they used Akamai in the past)
Cloudflare is the latest in a number of different CDN providers we've used to serve this over many years. I guess the question is, why is it important not to use a CDN?
HN is currently anti Cloudflare. The only thing worse probably would’ve been to serve the static files on GitHub.io
Same reason everyone else uses CF. Static page CDN only became too cheap to meter ~16 years ago, but if CF was around in the 90s IANA would have used it in the 90s too
IANA has a history of hosting even more important services with third-parties [0] [1], so this doesn't seem too problematic to me.
[0]: https://root-servers.org/
[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6305.html
NB. IANA isn't responsible for "root servers"
It's only responsible for root.zone, root.hints, .arpa and .int zones
AS112 is a volunteer project not a company
If it's a name in com/net/org only meant for documentation then why serve a page there for decades. If traffic is a problem then take it offline
Years ago IANA started requiring a user-agent header
FTP access to root.zone remains
*assets
Well, it's a popular website. By using Cloudflare I think they will save a lot of bandwidth and traffic because the page and assets can be cached.