> If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so.
That's a wrong way of looking at it though. For 99.99% individual sites, I wouldn't care if they were down for weeks. Even if I use this site, there are very few sites that I need to use daily. For the rest of them, if one of them randomly goes down I probably would never know or notice, because I didn't need it then. However, when single-point-of-failure provider, like Cloudflare, goes down, you bet I notice. I must notice, because my work would be affected, my CI/CD pipelines will start failing, my newsfeeds will stop, I will notice it in dozens of places - because everybody uses it. The aggregated fails-per-unit-of-time may be less but the impact of each fail is way, way more, and the probability of it impacting me is approaching certainty.
So for me, as an average internet user, it would be much better if all the world wouldn't go down at once, even if the instances of particular things going down would be more frequent - provided they are randomly distributed in time and not concentrated. If just one thing goes down, I could do another thing. If everything goes down, I can only sit and twiddle my thumbs until it's back up.
That's a wrong way of looking at it though. For 99.99% individual sites, I wouldn't care if they were down for weeks. Even if I use this site, there are very few sites that I need to use daily. For the rest of them, if one of them randomly goes down I probably would never know or notice, because I didn't need it then. However, when single-point-of-failure provider, like Cloudflare, goes down, you bet I notice. I must notice, because my work would be affected, my CI/CD pipelines will start failing, my newsfeeds will stop, I will notice it in dozens of places - because everybody uses it. The aggregated fails-per-unit-of-time may be less but the impact of each fail is way, way more, and the probability of it impacting me is approaching certainty.
So for me, as an average internet user, it would be much better if all the world wouldn't go down at once, even if the instances of particular things going down would be more frequent - provided they are randomly distributed in time and not concentrated. If just one thing goes down, I could do another thing. If everything goes down, I can only sit and twiddle my thumbs until it's back up.