Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

Hey, I'm Cloudflare's CTO. This doesn't sound right to me. Please forward the correspondence you've had with us to jgc@cloudflare.com and I will look into this internally.

Are you serving files other then html/images/css, etc? 300tb is a lot, AWS cloudfront would be charging ~$6000/month by a quick estimate.

Recognize they were probably taking a loss with your business, I'm surprised you didn't discuss how much bandwidth you were expecting when you agreed to the contract, sounds like a miscommunication.

$200/month is mind-bogglingly cheap for 200-300TB per month.

What are you doing with that much data that it doesn't generate enough value to be worth a few thousand per month?

Maybe CF could have given you a heads up sooner and communicated more clearly from the start. Part of the issue might be that they're making the assumption that their customers (generally more tech savvy) are aware of the value of bandwidth at that volume.

I would say that if you are doing 200TB/month then $200/m was too good to be true. Sounds like you have just outgrown your current plan. Have you costed that up on other providers? I assume you where not doing that sort of bandwidth on GCP. It's a different billing model than most clould providers. If you had stuck with GCP the costs would have grown in line with your bandwidth so you would probably be paying the $3000 by now with them. CF could probably do a better job with defining what the products are though.

As other people have stated, you will have trouble finding other CDNs that will be as cheap as CF. That being said, you can always try to do it yourself with a couple of dedicated machines and install varnish on them.

But I have to ask, if you're doing 300TB a month how are you not able to afford $3000 for CF?

Honestly I’m relieved I’d need to get into the hundred+ TB area before I get the sales call. I’d have expected it to be a much lower number.

How are you chucking that much data while still being concerned about cheap? I can’t really suggest anything useful technologically without knowing what the data is

Don’t knee jerk change supplier because you’re annoyed haha, you’re unlikely to get cheaper and kinda likely to get less reliable - that’s on you to justify later to the person asking why your 300TB/mo pipeline broke, not something I’d want to explain without having thought through the initial reaction properly!

At least discuss it with someone first, who knows maybe 3 grand a month isn’t that big an expense considering it’s probably something the company needs to operate. Having a “top level” executive layer implies much more budget elsewhere, it can’t be that big an expense. Maybe they can get rid of a lower level exec to pay for it. Or maybe you don’t need all of the outgoing data. Can’t really guess anything without knowing the situation better

Operating in an annoyed bubble is almost guaranteed to be way more stress down the road though in any case, get a fresh mind on it

I use both Cloudflare and Fastly. Haven't done a deep comparison of their pricing, but Fastly at my teeny scale (<$100 per month) is affordable for the benefit they provide.

Is CDN bandwidth your only need or do you also need features like log streaming to BigQuery, WAF, direct integration with Google via signed exchanges (SXGs)?

300TB is a lot. No idea what your business is. But that is a lot of data for a medium sized business.

I remember an article here about someone optimizing their cloudflare setup with something else and sending tons of data through some peering agreement. Its 2am and I don’t remember the details. Anyone else remember seeing that?

That's 1-2 cents a gb. Good luck finding less than that price anywhere.

Bunny cdn is around 1-2 cents

> I'm not saying CF is bad, but, their sales tactics are shady

Sounds like your company had unreasonable expectations, their business plan [1] doesn't mention anywhere they provide unlimited bandwidth, what they do say is who their Business plan is for, which should've set expectations:

> For small ecommerce websites and businesses requiring advanced security and performance, PCI compliance, and prioritized email support.

i.e. it's unreasonable to assume 200-300TB /month can be classified as a small ecommerce website and that your company should've been more diligent in verifying what the expected cost should be for their high bandwidth requirements than just assuming cloud hosting companies should bear the loss of their excessive resource usage in a fixed rate plan.

But I do think Cloudflare should clarify the free bandwidth their plans include to better clarify the suitability of their plans.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/business/

I have my issues with Cloudflare and their captcha and their contribution to the centralisation of the internet, but this doesn't really seem justified. You clearly aren't using their business plan for its intended use - and yes, marketing and sales teams are always going to emphasise features over limits, but I'm guessing a quick "hey we plan to use this for 300TB/month is that OK?" question up front would have saved a lot of effort on both sides.

Overall, I'm always really impressed by how the Cloudflare exec team is on here, helping out directly or offering to get involved personally when HN has a problem. I think if people keep abusing it like this, that level of support will probably be dialled back significantly, which would be a shame.

Perhaps a few comments are missing what seems to me to be the main point... its not about whether the product is cheap vs the competition.

It's about the sales process... if the client was open about bandwidth estimates and has broadly met them, then its still not great to offer a teaser rate and pull the rug later, once the integration is done. This would negatively impact the client, and isn't a way of doing business that great companies promote.

JGC said he'd take a look and that seems like a good response from CF.

You expect 300tb for less than 3k? Even that's a steal. Try calling Akamai and it'll be 10s more. Even Keycdn is going to cost you 7k. Sounds like you're serving video and expecting it to be free and complaining you're getting a steal at Cloudflare.

I love their products, but their sales hasn't really convinced me either. I contacted them while our web service was getting hammered by a TCP SYN flood. They asked me which layer the attack was on, and I told them L4. They proceeded to try to sell me some TCP proxy product of theirs for $$$$, and despite my protests, just wouldn't listen when I told them that their HTTPS proxying/load balancer/CDN/whatever product would probably be enough.

I left that call and activated that free tier product and it has been enough. No wonder their sales reps need to resort to such tactics when their $0/$20/$200 product is enough.

BunnyCDN, Beluga, and KeyCDN seem to have pretty decent pricing.

If you want another free CDN, you could consider DDOS-Guard albeit with some caution.

If you can list a budget, type of content, and/or required features, I can provide a better recommendation.

In the meantime, you can sift through the following websites:

https://www.cdnperf.com/

https://cdncomparison.com/

https://www.cdnplanet.com

To choose a CDN, will need to know following inputs: * What kind of delivery you're using ? Images ? Videos ? Streaming ?

* Where is your major traffic coming from ? US ? Asia ? Africa ?

* What kind of integration you're using on CF ? Is there any special features on CF that you're using ?

Alternatives, i could say alot: CDN77, BunnyCDN, Fastly etc... But it's really depends on your current setup.

Hard to say you were mistreated without knowing how exactly your sales conversations went, and what you're doing with your application, but I agree this must be dismaying. Still, I would rather you pay a fair (but below market) rate for your bandwidth to keep Cloudflare free or reasonably priced for my smaller services. This has me wanting to keep using them.

BunnyCDN