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The TOS seems a bit too illusory: "SECTION 10: LIMITATION ON NON-HTML CACHING You acknowledge that CloudFlare's Service is offered as a platform to cache and
by jstalin 14y ago
The TOS seems a bit too illusory:
"SECTION 10: LIMITATION ON NON-HTML CACHING
You acknowledge that CloudFlare's Service is offered as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites and is not offered for other purposes, such as remote storage. Accordingly, you understand and agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of hosting and serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. CloudFlare's Service is also a shared web caching service, which means a number of customers' websites are cached from the same server. To ensure that CloudFlare's Service is reliable and available for the greatest number of users, a customer's usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers' sites. Additionally, the purpose of CloudFlare's Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account _primarily_ as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a _disproportionate_ percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited. You further agree that if, _at CloudFlare's sole discretion_, you are _deemed_ to have violated this section, or if CloudFlare, _in its sole discretion_, deems it necessary due to excessive burden or potential adverse impact on CloudFlare's systems, potential adverse impact on other users, server processing power, server memory, abuse controls, _or other reasons_, CloudFlare may suspend or terminate your account without notice to or liability to you."
In other words, you can't host non-HTML, but you can if it isn't disproportionate, but if it is disproportionate, they can deem you to be a problem and cut off your service, without notice. That's not a contract at all. In legal parlance, that's an illusory contract -- when one side can modify their performance in any way at any time.
I use Cloudflare's $20 a month option and it worries me now that I might be deemed to be using a disproportionate about of space or bandwidth caching images, and then be cut off without notice.
EDIT: I love the cloudflare service and I'm not complaining. I just think their legal department needs to clarify this and the tech side of the house needs to be able to warn users when they are exceeding the bounds of what is acceptable.
- tlrobinson 14y agoI wonder what would happen if you embedded images directly in the HTML files (using data URIs or whatever).
- derefr 14y agoMy interpretation of this paragraph goes something like: > If and when your bandwidth usage gets high enough that one of our customer service people gets pinged about upgrading you, they'll also have a look on the dashboard to see what mixture of filetypes you're serving. If it's all static content, you're in trouble. I'm not quite sure how else that could be phrased into legalese, than what they already have there.