Cloudflare's URL Scanner, new features, and the story of how we built it
In this technical retrospective (2024), @jgrahamc shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 5 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 1 comments
This looks like a good alternative to urlscan.io I wish this would bypass cloudflare's own verification challenge for phishing sites hosted on cloudflare. A common issue I have with url scanners is I'm unable to get past the verification and the screenshot just shows the cloudflare page. So many phishing pages are using cloudflare now.