Comment by vasco
3 days ago
Yep, and if you contact their sales directly because you've been bitten before and tell them your traffic they will be happy to tell you that yes, other than a short trial you have to pay them for huge bandwidth from month one. It's actually surprising to me people would believe it's fully free. Like think for a bit that if that was the case Netflix would just move to Cloudflare free tier and Cloudflare would go bankrupt immediately.
Like think for a bit that if that was the case Netflix would just move to Cloudflare free tier and Cloudflare would go bankrupt immediately.
Cloudflare's free tier specifically excludes video. See https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...:
Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business) Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.
Replace Netflix with Reddit in that hypothetical then, would they be allowed to serve their substantial non-video traffic through the free tier? If so, you have to wonder why they choose to pay for Fastly instead.
We’d be happy to support Reddit on our free tier. I doubt we’d actually be able to measure the increase in bandwidth costs if they were to onboard.
Yes, and they are free to talk to us any time if they want to switch; I doubt they'd want to be on a free plan because there are significant extras that come with the paid plans.
Does this apply to caching R2 with the free tier CDN?
The R2 overview page explicitly lists "Storage for podcast episodes", but a podcast host under the free tier would serve a disproportionate percentage of audio files.
It's been asked and answered many times. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/service-specific-terms-deve...
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Audio is tiny compared to video (and even images), especially for podcasts, think ~1MB/minute. And they compress well if you want them to be smaller. High quality video (think 4K HDR) can quite comfortably be over 1MB per second.
I assume they don't want to become a file sharing website, but hosting a podcast is relatively easy on the bandwidth requirements.
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What about hosting video on R2 and using the CDN?
Frankly it’s none of y’alls beeswax what medium of content I’m deploying. I can understand restrictions on illegal and offensive content. I won’t be using Cloudflare if including a file or even putting some base64 in my html file will be a ToS violation.
It's these petty restrictions that make these pricing policies convenient, and it hurts the market :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://pricecontrol.biz/en/dumping-from-a-to-z/
Wouldn't a significant restriction on what you can host for free move it further from being dumping? I don't understand your logic.
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Well bad example, but as someone else said, replace with any other large non video service. I'm not making this up, I had calls with sales. And like I said, I don't think this is surprising, it's like "infinite bandwidth" deals from ISPs and phone data plans, etc. It's a reasonable expectation that you'd have to pay at some threshold.