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> you must use (paid services) in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN But what is a "large" file? 10mb? 100mb? Are there any actual specific

> you must use (paid services) in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN But what is a "large" file? 10mb? 100mb? Are there any actual specifications that I can read or is this just "use it and hope for the best, till you get a notification from Cloudflare sales team"?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yamtaddle 3y ago
AFAI am aware, "use it and hope for the best" is kinda the way CloudFlare usage in all the "self-serve" tiers has always worked. You have service until you make them unhappy for any of a variety of reasons, at which point you'll be prodded to start paying [EDIT: or paying more]. They're not actually giving away service that others charge thousands of dollars a month for, for free. If they were, most of those others would be out of business. Their free and self-serve tiers are nice and can even be good deals (you really get a lot out of that top-tier self-serve plan, for the money—watch out, some of the lower ones didn't have any SLA at all, last I checked) but if you're pushing serious bits, you're gonna end up pushed to a thousands-a-month enterprise plan. TL;DR unless you've got an enterprise plan with them, yeah, "use it and hope for the best, 'till you get a notification from CloudFlare" is pretty much how their plans work.
- seanw444 3y ago
  Well that's both cool and unsettling.
- password4321 3y ago
  Fly under the radar as long as you can; if you hear from Cloudflare (even sales), you're in trouble. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639212#34639763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639212#34639763
  - berkle4455 3y ago
    Cloudflare is Yelp 2.0
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  > They're not actually giving away service that others charge thousands of dollars a month for, for free. If they were, most of those others would be out of business. Well, It’s just that at a certain scale and business seriousness you will pay to guarantee certain levels of service which is why CF isn’t putting everything out of business. But CF’s “unguaranteed tier” is still high tier services for free.
  - yamtaddle 3y ago
    It's not just "guarantee levels of service", it's permission to sling lots of bits (and of any "type" you like) without being deliberately cut off. It's not like you're just paying for more 9s at other CDNs (or at CloudFlare). Yes, the free tier is in fact pretty amazing if you have mid-traffic-or-lower site and are mostly serving HTML pages and basic images, js, and css for those pages, and the stakes for availability are pretty low. Which describes quite a bit of the Web.
- mdasen 3y ago
  > They're not actually giving away service that others charge thousands of dollars a month for, for free Sure, I'm fine with that. The problem is that I don't know how much it'll cost if I fall out of their free tier. If I go with Bunny.net, I can get bandwidth for $0.005/GB (on their volume tier with 10 PoPs) or $0.01/GB (on their standard tier with 114 PoPs). $1,000 will buy me 200TB of bandwidth on their volume tier. If I'm using 200TB on Cloudflare, what is that going to cost me? $500? $10,000? Fastly's list price is $0.12/GB for the first 10TB + $0.08/GB after that so their price would be $16,400. And I'm sure that at 200TB/mo, I wouldn't be paying Fastly's list price, but at least I have an upper bound on the pricing. With Cloudflare, I really don't know. > "use it and hope for the best, 'till you get a notification from CloudFlare" I'd be fine with this if there were a 30-day migration window that I'd get (or something like that). The problem is that there have been a few stories of Cloudflare moving very quickly against a customer's usage.
  - yamtaddle 3y ago
    Cloudflare's enterprise pricing is, irritatingly, of the "contact us" variety (FYI typically starts around $5k, last I checked, and at least for us they weren't interested in reducing that by cutting all the shit we didn't need, such that they were effectively really expensive on a per-TB basis) but, to be fair, if you're doing any kind of real volume you're going to want to contact sales at those other places, too. Odds are sticker price is just an anchor for negotiations anyway. [EDIT] However, you're right that the lack of even limited pricing transparency makes relying on CloudFlare at lower levels risky because it's hard to know what kind of expenses you might, later, be exposed to.
  - nathants 3y ago
    i serve video via r2 and workers to share with friends. presumably this is fine. i’m building something more serious which will also serve video, and will go with bunny for this reason. negotiation is fine, but should be optional. which tiny startup wants to negotiate with every vendor?
    - Wallacy 3y ago
      I have few PB traffic of videos served from R2... that's fine. They just don't want to compete with they own solution.
Wallacy 3y ago
My POV as customer for 5 years, doing mostly Video and Binary transfers and asked to move to enterprise few times (and still on the Pro plan, never had any interruption): They will NEVER says specifics bytes or anything like that (any cloud provider that has any abuse prevention clausule will not too)! If you says that a "large" file is 100mb people will just gamble and split the files in 100mb chunks. Same for any value here. The idea is mostly about pattern recognition (any abuse detection algorithm) and how much do you pay and how much you are costing. Bandwidth is cheap for CF but they dont want anyone gaming the system, i will upgrade for enterprise at some point mostly because the SLA, but at the time im writing here, i pay $20 month for a service traffic that cost (to me) hundreds `per day` on AWS or GCP... People here talk like they multi million dollar project will be blocked because some user downloads a 10mb file on a free plan. But if you really have a critical product you can get enterprise plans starting at $1500 dollars, hardly more than 3K. The enterprise plan is mostly about the SLA than actually services; Thats not the reality of mostly of the people. The basics plans are very good for almost everyone IMHO. My rule of thumb of any cloud service / provider: You will for sure get deals that will cost very little to you, that is 10x/20x cheaper, but once you "savings" are on the 100x range you may find someone on the other side trying to make you to pay more. I have a friend that was banned from GCP for that reason (long story). Another example: Hetzner - You can do a lot with the "free" 20TB bandwidth... But do not think that just because theres a number here theres no "catch" for some "creative flow", we got blocked once, was a mistake and is resolved but anything free has abuse protection rules (sometimes not writen) and will find you.
- emadda 3y ago
  What services do GCP have that are 100x cheaper? Generally they seem quite expensive. I use GCP, very reliable though.
  - Wallacy 3y ago
    Was computed related, but he find a loop role on his business contract. He was right by the legal team os the service, but they used a another term that make they right to not work with us anyway. His document ID was banned (he cant create accounts with his name/id anymore). I dont remember the details, but was related to the free limits per account. And if my memory serves, he was in the plan that he can create how many parent accounts he wants for free. That plan does not exists anymore.
mdasen 3y ago
My feeling on this would be: they're probably fine shipping the static media assets for my site like the logo, CSS, JS, banner image, etc. Those are trivially cached with long lifetimes. I'm guessing what they don't want is an Imgur-like site where there's a lot of user-generated media content for free. The new section says: 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. To me, that's reasonably clear. If you're a blog that's content with some images between the logo and maybe a picture or two in an article, that's probably fine. That seems "proportionate" - in a similar proportion to most sites on the web. If you're Imgur where you're basically just serving media assets to people or if you're trying to make the next TikTok, that's disproportionate - beyond the normal proportion of media assets of most websites. Likewise, you can't run an NPM clone or download server for Linux ISOs off Cloudflare - that would be disproportionate. And if you're uploading podcasts to your website, those large audio files don't get a free ride. How much exactly is disproportionate? Of course they're going to have to leave that a tiny bit vague so that people don't game the system. To me, it feels reasonably clear. If you're building an average site, don't worry about traffic to it. Your regular old blog is fine. If you're building something that leans heavily on serving images, audio, or video, you can't do that. Your podcasts should go into R2, your video should go into Cloudflare Stream, etc. or not be served via Cloudflare's CDN.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

yamtaddle 3y ago

AFAI am aware, "use it and hope for the best" is kinda the way CloudFlare usage in all the "self-serve" tiers has always worked. You have service until you make them unhappy for any of a variety of reasons, at which point you'll be prodded to start paying [EDIT: or paying more]. They're not actually giving away service that others charge thousands of dollars a month for, for free. If they were, most of those others would be out of business. Their free and self-serve tiers are nice and can even be good deals (you really get a lot out of that top-tier self-serve plan, for the money—watch out, some of the lower ones didn't have any SLA at all, last I checked) but if you're pushing serious bits, you're gonna end up pushed to a thousands-a-month enterprise plan. TL;DR unless you've got an enterprise plan with them, yeah, "use it and hope for the best, 'till you get a notification from CloudFlare" is pretty much how their plans work.

seanw444 3y ago
Well that's both cool and unsettling.
password4321 3y ago
Fly under the radar as long as you can; if you hear from Cloudflare (even sales), you're in trouble. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639212#34639763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639212#34639763
- berkle4455 3y ago
  Cloudflare is Yelp 2.0
hombre_fatal 3y ago
> They're not actually giving away service that others charge thousands of dollars a month for, for free. If they were, most of those others would be out of business. Well, It’s just that at a certain scale and business seriousness you will pay to guarantee certain levels of service which is why CF isn’t putting everything out of business. But CF’s “unguaranteed tier” is still high tier services for free.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  It's not just "guarantee levels of service", it's permission to sling lots of bits (and of any "type" you like) without being deliberately cut off. It's not like you're just paying for more 9s at other CDNs (or at CloudFlare). Yes, the free tier is in fact pretty amazing if you have mid-traffic-or-lower site and are mostly serving HTML pages and basic images, js, and css for those pages, and the stakes for availability are pretty low. Which describes quite a bit of the Web.
mdasen 3y ago
> They're not actually giving away service that others charge thousands of dollars a month for, for free Sure, I'm fine with that. The problem is that I don't know how much it'll cost if I fall out of their free tier. If I go with Bunny.net, I can get bandwidth for $0.005/GB (on their volume tier with 10 PoPs) or $0.01/GB (on their standard tier with 114 PoPs). $1,000 will buy me 200TB of bandwidth on their volume tier. If I'm using 200TB on Cloudflare, what is that going to cost me? $500? $10,000? Fastly's list price is $0.12/GB for the first 10TB + $0.08/GB after that so their price would be $16,400. And I'm sure that at 200TB/mo, I wouldn't be paying Fastly's list price, but at least I have an upper bound on the pricing. With Cloudflare, I really don't know. > "use it and hope for the best, 'till you get a notification from CloudFlare" I'd be fine with this if there were a 30-day migration window that I'd get (or something like that). The problem is that there have been a few stories of Cloudflare moving very quickly against a customer's usage.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  Cloudflare's enterprise pricing is, irritatingly, of the "contact us" variety (FYI typically starts around $5k, last I checked, and at least for us they weren't interested in reducing that by cutting all the shit we didn't need, such that they were effectively really expensive on a per-TB basis) but, to be fair, if you're doing any kind of real volume you're going to want to contact sales at those other places, too. Odds are sticker price is just an anchor for negotiations anyway. [EDIT] However, you're right that the lack of even limited pricing transparency makes relying on CloudFlare at lower levels risky because it's hard to know what kind of expenses you might, later, be exposed to.
- nathants 3y ago
  i serve video via r2 and workers to share with friends. presumably this is fine. i’m building something more serious which will also serve video, and will go with bunny for this reason. negotiation is fine, but should be optional. which tiny startup wants to negotiate with every vendor?
  - Wallacy 3y ago
    I have few PB traffic of videos served from R2... that's fine. They just don't want to compete with they own solution.

Wallacy 3y ago

My POV as customer for 5 years, doing mostly Video and Binary transfers and asked to move to enterprise few times (and still on the Pro plan, never had any interruption): They will NEVER says specifics bytes or anything like that (any cloud provider that has any abuse prevention clausule will not too)! If you says that a "large" file is 100mb people will just gamble and split the files in 100mb chunks. Same for any value here. The idea is mostly about pattern recognition (any abuse detection algorithm) and how much do you pay and how much you are costing. Bandwidth is cheap for CF but they dont want anyone gaming the system, i will upgrade for enterprise at some point mostly because the SLA, but at the time im writing here, i pay $20 month for a service traffic that cost (to me) hundreds `per day` on AWS or GCP... People here talk like they multi million dollar project will be blocked because some user downloads a 10mb file on a free plan. But if you really have a critical product you can get enterprise plans starting at $1500 dollars, hardly more than 3K. The enterprise plan is mostly about the SLA than actually services; Thats not the reality of mostly of the people. The basics plans are very good for almost everyone IMHO. My rule of thumb of any cloud service / provider: You will for sure get deals that will cost very little to you, that is 10x/20x cheaper, but once you "savings" are on the 100x range you may find someone on the other side trying to make you to pay more. I have a friend that was banned from GCP for that reason (long story). Another example: Hetzner - You can do a lot with the "free" 20TB bandwidth... But do not think that just because theres a number here theres no "catch" for some "creative flow", we got blocked once, was a mistake and is resolved but anything free has abuse protection rules (sometimes not writen) and will find you.

emadda 3y ago
What services do GCP have that are 100x cheaper? Generally they seem quite expensive. I use GCP, very reliable though.
- Wallacy 3y ago
  Was computed related, but he find a loop role on his business contract. He was right by the legal team os the service, but they used a another term that make they right to not work with us anyway. His document ID was banned (he cant create accounts with his name/id anymore). I dont remember the details, but was related to the free limits per account. And if my memory serves, he was in the plan that he can create how many parent accounts he wants for free. That plan does not exists anymore.

mdasen 3y ago

My feeling on this would be: they're probably fine shipping the static media assets for my site like the logo, CSS, JS, banner image, etc. Those are trivially cached with long lifetimes. I'm guessing what they don't want is an Imgur-like site where there's a lot of user-generated media content for free. The new section says: 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. To me, that's reasonably clear. If you're a blog that's content with some images between the logo and maybe a picture or two in an article, that's probably fine. That seems "proportionate" - in a similar proportion to most sites on the web. If you're Imgur where you're basically just serving media assets to people or if you're trying to make the next TikTok, that's disproportionate - beyond the normal proportion of media assets of most websites. Likewise, you can't run an NPM clone or download server for Linux ISOs off Cloudflare - that would be disproportionate. And if you're uploading podcasts to your website, those large audio files don't get a free ride. How much exactly is disproportionate? Of course they're going to have to leave that a tiny bit vague so that people don't game the system. To me, it feels reasonably clear. If you're building an average site, don't worry about traffic to it. Your regular old blog is fine. If you're building something that leans heavily on serving images, audio, or video, you can't do that. Your podcasts should go into R2, your video should go into Cloudflare Stream, etc. or not be served via Cloudflare's CDN.