Switching to Cloudflare because QUIC.cloud kept erroring with 403 Forbidden

I switched my CDN provider from QUIC.cloud to Cloudflare. Why? Because quic.cloud kept erroring out on me.

Very suddenly around May 14 2024, I started receiving HTTP 403 Forbidden when visiting my blog. After lots of trial and error, I found that it really only stopped when I “Bypassed CDN” entirely. No amount of disabling security checks or allowing my IP and User-Agent would fix the issue.

I did discover a few things:

• My tablet, phone, and laptop would all encounter the error at different times on different refreshes, on different browsers, on different internet connections, and even in incognito. This gave me a very strong feeling that it was not actually permissions related.
• Running through CURL with verbose, I noticed some headers that suggest I’m assigned two different POPs and only one of the two returns the 403 Forbidden error.
• The headers on a 403 were very bare, so it likely wasn’t from wordpress or my server.

So I switched to Cloudflare. I thought about trying other CDNs but none of the other ones had good free tiers or had a way to lock down specific pages from bots. I found bots to be quite annoying on my website, trying to take it down by resetting passwords aggressively or by leaving waves and waves of comments. While I don’t like supporting mega companies, they really are a decent choice in the current ecosystem.