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It's important to note that Cloudflare charges by the minutes served ($1/1000 min). If your video is a short looping background or product teaser, it's probably

It's important to note that Cloudflare charges by the minutes served ($1/1000 min). If your video is a short looping background or product teaser, it's probably affordable. But if you're streaming entire demos or movies or such, it can get expensive pretty quick. Vimeo is a flat $20/mo, subject to fair use (approx 2 TB/mo). Worth doing the math to see which makes more sense for you.

iainctduncan 5y ago
that would seem to be a reason to build an app that can easily have vimeo swapped out for cloudflare when you reach liftoff, eh?
iainctduncan 5y ago
thanks, that's a very helpful tip. Is there any disadvantage to Vimeo pro against cloudflare that you think is worth noting?
- technobabbler 5y ago
  I don't know your exact use case. If you tell us more, we can help you better. We used Vimeo to serve an approx 30 sec video to about a million viewers a month and it was great. We noticed some minor downtime (few minutes at a time) but that was acceptable to us. Cloudflare might be more reliable, not sure? Network infra is their bread and butter, and I tremendously admire them, but their streaming offering was overkill for our basic needs. Ultimately their target markets are different. Cloudflare is an infrastructure company targeting devops teams, Vimeo targets small-to-medium content-driven businesses who don't want to do devops. Probably Vimeo's control panel is easier to use for content producers, whereas Cloudflare might have better APIs for devops types? At a few thousand viewers a month, it's a pretty trivial use case and either company (or any other professional video host) would probably be just fine. It comes down to your own pipeline/production or business needs, probably. As for being able to switch from one host to another, hopefully you're promoting a landing page of some sort and not a direct video URL. In that case you should be able to switch video providers at any time without interruption. Just keep the old version up alongside the new one for a few days, in case anyone has the page cached.

iainctduncan 5y ago

that would seem to be a reason to build an app that can easily have vimeo swapped out for cloudflare when you reach liftoff, eh?

iainctduncan 5y ago

thanks, that's a very helpful tip. Is there any disadvantage to Vimeo pro against cloudflare that you think is worth noting?

technobabbler 5y ago
I don't know your exact use case. If you tell us more, we can help you better. We used Vimeo to serve an approx 30 sec video to about a million viewers a month and it was great. We noticed some minor downtime (few minutes at a time) but that was acceptable to us. Cloudflare might be more reliable, not sure? Network infra is their bread and butter, and I tremendously admire them, but their streaming offering was overkill for our basic needs. Ultimately their target markets are different. Cloudflare is an infrastructure company targeting devops teams, Vimeo targets small-to-medium content-driven businesses who don't want to do devops. Probably Vimeo's control panel is easier to use for content producers, whereas Cloudflare might have better APIs for devops types? At a few thousand viewers a month, it's a pretty trivial use case and either company (or any other professional video host) would probably be just fine. It comes down to your own pipeline/production or business needs, probably. As for being able to switch from one host to another, hopefully you're promoting a landing page of some sort and not a direct video URL. In that case you should be able to switch video providers at any time without interruption. Just keep the old version up alongside the new one for a few days, in case anyone has the page cached.