Comment by jgrahamc

Comment by jgrahamc 3 days ago

15 replies

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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.

jsheard 3 days ago

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.

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  • eastdakota 2 days ago

    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.

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  • jgrahamc 2 days ago

    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.

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Scaevolus 3 days ago

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.

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  • Ambroos 3 days ago

    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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    • PaulHoule 3 days ago

      A music album which gives an hour of entertainment might be distributed in lossless form at a size of 300 MB or so. A similar length TV episode could be between that and 1 GB. Podcasts are usually way lower quality and much smaller.

      A lot of people who had large image collections (like myself) online struggled with revenue relative to cost circa 2012, I saw a lot of sites I respected go down, though we did see some new style social sites such as Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. Somehow YouTube was doing much better in terms of revenue/cost with video.

      Compressing images for the web is not at all trivial, I over-compressed a few million images and really regretted it. When I post to social now I use Photoshop's "(Legacy) Save for web" which has a nice slider for the quality level and find I can get images I take with my Sony to look like they came from a pro camera between 80kb (small flower, blurry background) to 800kb. I see huge splash images on blogs that are smaller, they make a good first impression, look close and the blocking is awful.

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JonoBB 3 days ago

What about hosting video on R2 and using the CDN?

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benatkin 3 days ago

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/

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  • Dylan16807 3 days ago

    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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    • benatkin 3 days ago

      No, if they had to be more consistent with the rules this type of dumping wouldn’t be as effective.

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      • Dylan16807 3 days ago

        What's inconsistent about allowing web pages but not video?

        If they had a limit of 50MB average per page navigation, would you call that rule consistent? It would have largely the same effect and I don't think it would affect the ease of dumping.

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vasco 3 days ago

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.

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