Also this is available on Cloudflare's free plan so it's much safer to take the precaution in case you might need it down the line, rather than get taken down and have to fiddle with setting up Cloudflare on the spot.
People have messed with things and found bugs (so far always reported more-or-less ethically), and lots of scanners go across the Internet daily, but I've never seen a deliberate take-down effort. (Kind of wondering whether I'm calling that upon myself now, but so be it. Let's see what happens.)
This fear of having to react to a DoS attack by knocking on big brother's door and thus preemptively knocking, it's so anti self hosting mentality, but is also pervasive throughout the self hosting community, I really don't understand it.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/about/default-cache-...
> Cloudflare does not consider the asset eligible to cache and your Cloudflare settings do not explicitly instruct Cloudflare to cache the asset. Instead, the asset was requested from the origin web server. Use Page Rules to implement custom caching options.
The html page and the hit counter (counter.pl) aren't cached.