This can be another stupid question, but because I’m serving only finnish audience I don’t see any reason to use Cloudflare, so I konw it only by reputation.
But if its only benefit is stopping DDoS, and DDoS mostly means just too many calls made by
- useless SEO-crawlers
- another bots made by script kiddies
then why not use Nginx front of Discourse and stop known user agents there? When combined with Fail2ban that would reduce load something like 90 % (sure stetson statistic, but a lot anyway).