5 ms·

That’s a free tier that doesn’t sound sustainable then, so that raises alarm bells to me.

ilogik 3y ago
it's 100% not sustainable. Use it while it's good, but don't get vendor locked in, because sooner or later they will increase the prices
- ignoramous 3y ago
  > it's 100% not sustainable As a business for Cloudflare? Cloudflare in 2014 blogged about how they work relentlessly to bring down bandwidth costs by peering aggressively where possible [2] (which apparently means $0 for unlimited bandwidth [3]). And where they can't / don't [4], egress is 5x (est) the ingress (one pays for the higher among the two), but this creates an opportunity for an arbitrage and give away DDoS protection for free. This is pretty similar to Amazon's free-shipping offer for Prime customers despite it being one of the biggest loss makers to their retail business. Prime basically has since forced Amazon to bring down costs through building expensive and vast distribution & logistics network that spawns the globe. Doing so was a considerable drain on the resources in the short-run, but in the long run, it has become an unbreachable moat around its largest business. Analysts like Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) and Matthew Eash (hhhypergrowth.com) have written in detail about Cloudflare's modus operandii over the years, with both agreeing that Cloudflare's model is so brilliantly disruptive that even Clayton Christensen would be proud of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33337183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33337183
- dbbk 3y ago
  They've been going for at least 10 years...
- EasyMark 3y ago
  This is why we still use services on VM's and open source containers. We can move our services anywhere, including selfhosting. AWS and Google offer some amazing solutions, but lock in ain't worth it if you can manage your own stack via serverless/vm solutions.
lifthrasiir 3y ago
I have heard that they rather drastically constrain QoS instead, which does sound reasonable. So you are still not charged for abusive traffic, but your service will be much slower than what is actually possible with paid tiers.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  So you'd be either slow or pay them "for protection". Something that reminds me of;)
  - stavros 3y ago
    Capitalism? Mob-style "protection" would be if Cloudflare were the ones who DDoSed you if you didn't pay.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      How naive if you think the mob would disclose when it's affiliates trash your shop.
    - gkbrk 3y ago
      Yeah. Instead Cloudflare hosts the websites of DDoS sellers and refuses to take them down or tell you who they are. A lot of these DDoS-for-hire services use Cloudflare to hide their real IP.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
danogentili 3y ago
I believe it's quite the opposite, cloud has normalized absurdly high traffic fees, and that is what should be raising alarm bells.
- rnts08 3y ago
  Yes, cloud services have inflated both bandwidth and amortized hardware costs to absurd levels. You pay for not having to know what to do in order to run something online. Until it breaks.
- fernandotakai 3y ago
  cloudflare has a blogpost that kind of explains a bit on cost of bandwidth https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a... (from 2014, so it might be super outdated)
blitzar 3y ago
By the time it isnt sustaninable I will have IPO'd and be the next offensive new money tech billionaire writing threads on twitter telling you the secret to success is the 5am grindset and everyone who isnt sinking 5mil into the next big thing (tm) can have fun staying poor.
underdeserver 3y ago
These guys know what they're doing. If and when Cloudflare dies we'll find something else.
DontBreakAlex 3y ago
That's because amazon and big telecom convinced you that bandwidth is expensive. It isn't. Once the equipment is there, you might as well use it.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Wouldn't there be at least a handful of competitors if the economics worked out that way?
  - nromiun 3y ago
    There are a lot of them: https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress
  - oefrha 3y ago
    A good number of small hosts offer very cheap bandwidth compared to AWS. With Cloudflare’s economy of scale, their costs should be even lower. You only need a ~100Mbps link to serve 30TB/mo, which would cost them ~$10, maybe less. They’ve written about it before: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress
  - happytiger 3y ago
    A good data center can sell you a sustained 10Gbps for, and I’m guessing at going rate, but like 4-7k a month? If you’re making a commitment cheaper, and that’s basically a retail pipe for someone in a colocated facility. For larger providers, bandwidth cost drops tremendously, especially if you’re well connected as transit is much cheaper and if you are really large or a network provider you may even be routing between your own facilities or in some cases from one customer to another and every large scale isp is going to want a “direct link” to your facility (a peering relationship). Those costs are astronomically small at scale for bandwidth. The ISP or similar then turns around and sells a sustained network throughout as GB transferred, which isn’t how wholesale bandwidth is sold at all. So the get to charge for the data the pipe moves while they only pay for the connection itself — the markup added to this process is considerable. For someone operated a global CDN, which is basically what they do, they have racks of storage and computer collocated all over the world and optimize the living crap out of their network to reduce their costs and make it run on as many peering relationships as possible. It’s an expensive and complex business to set up, but once it’s set up you get a fairly good and consistent return out of it. The reason for this article is related to the nature of that business: it’s the issue of liability. When you have policies where you protect your clients from downsides and excessive use on the network, you suddenly have to assume the role of paying attention to what’s on the network and policing it’s contents. That’s not possible with a massive system like this generally, so they push the liability down to the customer and discount the mistakes that come up. That’s why things are set up like this… this kind of stuff isn’t their business at all really. They are looking for the customers that convert and pay, which is very profitable, and the free tier is often thought of as a sustainable cost if you are large enough scale, as it substitutes for the rather massive expense of marketing and sales which is one of the largest expenses in a bandwidth focused business. CAC is the free tier. There also competitors, but the benefits of scale are tremendous in terms of cost efficiency. A large provider might be paying just a very small fraction of a penny or less (even “free”) compared to what a small provider is paying. So that’s why you end up with fewer competitors because it truly is a business that benefits from economies of scale. There are other smarter people on here who can correct any mistakes I’ve made or provide better pricing or whatever, but that’s the more in depth answer.
raffraffraff 3y ago
Their stock performance would agree
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  While a funny comment, stock performance is at best loosely coupled to sustainability as a company.
kkielhofner 3y ago
Peering. Here's how it works: 1) I have a big network and I exchange traffic with another big network. Think of "eyeball" networks like last-mile ISPs (Comcast, mobile providers, etc) where a substantial portion of end-user traffic is going to handfuls of well known networks - Cloudflare, AWS, Netflix, etc. 2) Comcast and Cloudflare say "Hey, I send you X TB/PB/etc and you send me X TB/PB/etc. We both currently pay another provider to route that traffic between us. Let's not do that." 3) In locations where it makes sense they basically throw a cable across datacenters, POPs, internet exchanges, etc. The cost for this is typically extremely low - it's basically a port on a switch/router on each side and MAYBE a "cross connect fee" from the facility. This is usually billed in the tens of dollars/mo if at all. It takes very little time/effort to configure this but of course the details are more complex - multiple ports, multiple facilities, etc. 4) Both sides start routing traffic between their networks over their new shiny direct cables and extremely high speed ports. Faster throughput, lower latency, improved reliability, frees up bandwidth to the transit provider they were using previously, and most importantly the cost of bandwidth between the two networks goes to zero. This is all well known and publicly available because it's visible in the global routing table(s). Cloudflare, for example[0]. All of the large providers do this and AWS, etc charging in bandwidth per GB (especially at their rates) is more-or-less pure profit. I have a theory that AWS, etc capitalize on people not really understanding this anymore. AWS is 20 years old - that's an entire generation of CTO/CIOs on down that are completely unfamiliar with these details and think $0.10/GB or whatever is "just what bandwidth costs". It is not. [0] - https://bgp.he.net/AS13335#_peers https://bgp.he.net/AS13335#_peers
- bombcar 3y ago
  People don’t really and have never fully understood this - and why Netflix using a lower tier provider with bad peering caused companies to … not upgrade their links.
EasyMark 3y ago
I think a lot of people don't understand how cheap bandwidth is and is decreasing in cost practically every day. Amazon and Google have a lot of people fooled. Go ask someone operating in China and East Asia (and Japan) how much they're paying for local solutions.

it's 100% not sustainable. Use it while it's good, but don't get vendor locked in, because sooner or later they will increase the prices

ignoramous 3y ago
> it's 100% not sustainable As a business for Cloudflare? Cloudflare in 2014 blogged about how they work relentlessly to bring down bandwidth costs by peering aggressively where possible [2] (which apparently means $0 for unlimited bandwidth [3]). And where they can't / don't [4], egress is 5x (est) the ingress (one pays for the higher among the two), but this creates an opportunity for an arbitrage and give away DDoS protection for free. This is pretty similar to Amazon's free-shipping offer for Prime customers despite it being one of the biggest loss makers to their retail business. Prime basically has since forced Amazon to bring down costs through building expensive and vast distribution & logistics network that spawns the globe. Doing so was a considerable drain on the resources in the short-run, but in the long run, it has become an unbreachable moat around its largest business. Analysts like Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) and Matthew Eash (hhhypergrowth.com) have written in detail about Cloudflare's modus operandii over the years, with both agreeing that Cloudflare's model is so brilliantly disruptive that even Clayton Christensen would be proud of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33337183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33337183
dbbk 3y ago
They've been going for at least 10 years...
EasyMark 3y ago
This is why we still use services on VM's and open source containers. We can move our services anywhere, including selfhosting. AWS and Google offer some amazing solutions, but lock in ain't worth it if you can manage your own stack via serverless/vm solutions.

lifthrasiir 3y ago

I have heard that they rather drastically constrain QoS instead, which does sound reasonable. So you are still not charged for abusive traffic, but your service will be much slower than what is actually possible with paid tiers.

throwaway290 3y ago
So you'd be either slow or pay them "for protection". Something that reminds me of;)
- stavros 3y ago
  Capitalism? Mob-style "protection" would be if Cloudflare were the ones who DDoSed you if you didn't pay.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    How naive if you think the mob would disclose when it's affiliates trash your shop.
  - gkbrk 3y ago
    Yeah. Instead Cloudflare hosts the websites of DDoS sellers and refuses to take them down or tell you who they are. A lot of these DDoS-for-hire services use Cloudflare to hide their real IP.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

danogentili 3y ago

I believe it's quite the opposite, cloud has normalized absurdly high traffic fees, and that is what should be raising alarm bells.

rnts08 3y ago
Yes, cloud services have inflated both bandwidth and amortized hardware costs to absurd levels. You pay for not having to know what to do in order to run something online. Until it breaks.
fernandotakai 3y ago
cloudflare has a blogpost that kind of explains a bit on cost of bandwidth https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a... (from 2014, so it might be super outdated)

blitzar 3y ago

By the time it isnt sustaninable I will have IPO'd and be the next offensive new money tech billionaire writing threads on twitter telling you the secret to success is the 5am grindset and everyone who isnt sinking 5mil into the next big thing (tm) can have fun staying poor.

underdeserver 3y ago

These guys know what they're doing. If and when Cloudflare dies we'll find something else.

DontBreakAlex 3y ago

That's because amazon and big telecom convinced you that bandwidth is expensive. It isn't. Once the equipment is there, you might as well use it.

whatshisface 3y ago
Wouldn't there be at least a handful of competitors if the economics worked out that way?
- nromiun 3y ago
  There are a lot of them: https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress
- oefrha 3y ago
  A good number of small hosts offer very cheap bandwidth compared to AWS. With Cloudflare’s economy of scale, their costs should be even lower. You only need a ~100Mbps link to serve 30TB/mo, which would cost them ~$10, maybe less. They’ve written about it before: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress
- happytiger 3y ago
  A good data center can sell you a sustained 10Gbps for, and I’m guessing at going rate, but like 4-7k a month? If you’re making a commitment cheaper, and that’s basically a retail pipe for someone in a colocated facility. For larger providers, bandwidth cost drops tremendously, especially if you’re well connected as transit is much cheaper and if you are really large or a network provider you may even be routing between your own facilities or in some cases from one customer to another and every large scale isp is going to want a “direct link” to your facility (a peering relationship). Those costs are astronomically small at scale for bandwidth. The ISP or similar then turns around and sells a sustained network throughout as GB transferred, which isn’t how wholesale bandwidth is sold at all. So the get to charge for the data the pipe moves while they only pay for the connection itself — the markup added to this process is considerable. For someone operated a global CDN, which is basically what they do, they have racks of storage and computer collocated all over the world and optimize the living crap out of their network to reduce their costs and make it run on as many peering relationships as possible. It’s an expensive and complex business to set up, but once it’s set up you get a fairly good and consistent return out of it. The reason for this article is related to the nature of that business: it’s the issue of liability. When you have policies where you protect your clients from downsides and excessive use on the network, you suddenly have to assume the role of paying attention to what’s on the network and policing it’s contents. That’s not possible with a massive system like this generally, so they push the liability down to the customer and discount the mistakes that come up. That’s why things are set up like this… this kind of stuff isn’t their business at all really. They are looking for the customers that convert and pay, which is very profitable, and the free tier is often thought of as a sustainable cost if you are large enough scale, as it substitutes for the rather massive expense of marketing and sales which is one of the largest expenses in a bandwidth focused business. CAC is the free tier. There also competitors, but the benefits of scale are tremendous in terms of cost efficiency. A large provider might be paying just a very small fraction of a penny or less (even “free”) compared to what a small provider is paying. So that’s why you end up with fewer competitors because it truly is a business that benefits from economies of scale. There are other smarter people on here who can correct any mistakes I’ve made or provide better pricing or whatever, but that’s the more in depth answer.

raffraffraff 3y ago

Their stock performance would agree

actionfromafar 3y ago
While a funny comment, stock performance is at best loosely coupled to sustainability as a company.

kkielhofner 3y ago

Peering. Here's how it works: 1) I have a big network and I exchange traffic with another big network. Think of "eyeball" networks like last-mile ISPs (Comcast, mobile providers, etc) where a substantial portion of end-user traffic is going to handfuls of well known networks - Cloudflare, AWS, Netflix, etc. 2) Comcast and Cloudflare say "Hey, I send you X TB/PB/etc and you send me X TB/PB/etc. We both currently pay another provider to route that traffic between us. Let's not do that." 3) In locations where it makes sense they basically throw a cable across datacenters, POPs, internet exchanges, etc. The cost for this is typically extremely low - it's basically a port on a switch/router on each side and MAYBE a "cross connect fee" from the facility. This is usually billed in the tens of dollars/mo if at all. It takes very little time/effort to configure this but of course the details are more complex - multiple ports, multiple facilities, etc. 4) Both sides start routing traffic between their networks over their new shiny direct cables and extremely high speed ports. Faster throughput, lower latency, improved reliability, frees up bandwidth to the transit provider they were using previously, and most importantly the cost of bandwidth between the two networks goes to zero. This is all well known and publicly available because it's visible in the global routing table(s). Cloudflare, for example[0]. All of the large providers do this and AWS, etc charging in bandwidth per GB (especially at their rates) is more-or-less pure profit. I have a theory that AWS, etc capitalize on people not really understanding this anymore. AWS is 20 years old - that's an entire generation of CTO/CIOs on down that are completely unfamiliar with these details and think $0.10/GB or whatever is "just what bandwidth costs". It is not. [0] - https://bgp.he.net/AS13335#_peers https://bgp.he.net/AS13335#_peers

bombcar 3y ago
People don’t really and have never fully understood this - and why Netflix using a lower tier provider with bad peering caused companies to … not upgrade their links.

EasyMark 3y ago

I think a lot of people don't understand how cheap bandwidth is and is decreasing in cost practically every day. Amazon and Google have a lot of people fooled. Go ask someone operating in China and East Asia (and Japan) how much they're paying for local solutions.