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The Orange Cloud Report

Core platform

Spectrum

Score: 5/10

TCP/UDP proxying magic, priced out of the use cases that need it most.

Last updated

Spectrum extends Cloudflare’s network to arbitrary TCP and UDP — meaning DDoS protection and anycast routing for things that aren’t HTTP: game servers, SSH, MQTT, custom protocols. Technically, it’s exactly the product the game hosting industry has begged for.

The economics kill it. Per-GB pricing on high-throughput protocols is untenable: proxying real game server traffic through Spectrum costs more than the servers themselves. So the product that should be the answer for game hosting ends up reserved for low-bandwidth ports on Enterprise contracts (SSH and Minecraft on the lower plans, everything else negotiated).

Five points for genuinely impressive engineering that I can rarely justify paying for. If the pricing ever matches Magic Transit-style realism for sustained throughput, this becomes a 9.