Set up a practically free CDN

https://gist.github.com/charlesroper/f2da6152d6789fa6f25e9d194a42b889

by frogger8 • 5 years ago

399 147 5 years ago

gist.github.com

cj• 5 years ago

I was expecting to read about how to set up the infrastructure to run my own CDN infrastructure for free (hard to believe is possible, so I clicked).

Instead, it's an article about how to use Cloudflare to deliver static assets for free, on Cloudflare's free tier.

Edit: I would love to read more about how to set up a cheap self-managed CDN, perhaps using cheap VPS servers spread out in different regions.

vbernat• 5 years ago

This link may be of interest: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/build-your-own-anycast-networ...

cmroanirgo• 5 years ago

I've been wanting the browsers to support SRV dns records for quite some time now. Unfortunately, both firefox and chrome have bugs in the WONTFIX status. The reasons for these statuses given are poor imo, but the implementation could add an extremely interesting dynamic to the internet. It would be easy to set up vps around the world and let SRV records set up in a round robin manner control it. Will it be as good as a bgp controlled one? Unlikely, but it would be 100% in your control and easy to set up, unlike going cloudflare.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14328

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=22423

lewisl9029• 5 years ago

Indeed, I was expecting something like this: https://fly.io/blog/the-5-hour-content-delivery-network/

Good thing it already exists!

ignoramous2• 5 years ago

I would love to read more about how to set up a cheap self-managed CDN.

searchableguy• 5 years ago

Many of the files will violate cloudflare terms of service. You cannot put video files behind normal cloudflare cdn as an example.

This is a risky setup.

sascha_sl2• 5 years ago

FWIW a partner of mine has been using this setup less for the CDN aspect and more for the free B2 egress, and a TB or two of large encrypted files (rclone crypt remote) have not resulted in any complaints.

fivre• 5 years ago

This part of the Cloudflare ToS only applies to cached content. They're fine with simply proxying to your video files.

magila2• 5 years ago

That is not true. Cloudflare's ToS prohibits serving video files via their CDN regardless of whether they're cached or not.

boffinism2• 5 years ago

440% cheaper than S3 per GB.

However the author thinks percentages work.... They are not right.

parsadotsh• 5 years ago

It does make sense. Consider the phrase "twice as cheap"

boffinism2• 5 years ago

What is 440% less than 1, then? In my book, it's -3.4.

sascha_sl2• 5 years ago

It should be percentage points, because "100% cheaper" would already be free.

It probably means AWS is 440% more expensive.

mulmen• 5 years ago

I have always found that phrasing to be confusing. Consider the reciprocal, “half as cheap”. Should that be interpreted as… double?

Say “half the cost” or “cheaper by half”.

Blahah3• 5 years ago

It doesn't make sense. Consider the phrase "once as cheap". Multiply by two. That's twice as cheap. Meaningless.

wlesieutre• 5 years ago

I've considered it, and decided that "twice as cheap" is equally poor choice of words

zild3d• 5 years ago

yeah pretty sure they mean 77% cheaper

guy98238710• 5 years ago

The wording is indeed confusing, but not every interpretation is wrong. They might mean 440% more efficient, i.e. 5.4x cheaper.

lucumo• 5 years ago

That's still an innumerate phrasing.

ralferoo• 5 years ago

Then again, the title of the post says "practically free" and goes on to say it's actually $5 a month, so I took the rest of the figures with a grain of salt...

howdydoo• 5 years ago

B2 itself is not $5 a month. That $5 service is a separate consumer-focused "unlimited" backup service from the same company. B2 just charges for storage and transfer. Yeah, the author was rambling a bit.

Qub3d• 5 years ago

B2 costs me roughly 52 cents per month to backup 250GB of data. I'd say that if you have enough income to have an internet connection and generate enough data to want a cloud backup tool, it is effectively free.

d1sxeyes• 5 years ago

Driven by the fact that using comparative adjectives in this context seems to be at best confusing, I thought I'd play around with some numbers to see if I could understand what the author was trying to convey.

First, it's important to clarify why comparative adjectives don't work here. Look at the following sentence.

- A $5 cookie is worth twice as much as a $2.50 cookie

Here, we establish the baseline (the $2.50 cookie), and express how much better the $5 cookie is.

We could also say the inverse:

- A $2.50 cookie is worth half as much as a $5 cookie.

What we can't do is the following:

- A $5 cookie is double more expensive than a $2.50 cookie.

We can make a statement (the cookie is more expensive), or share the factor by establishing the baseline (twice as expensive as), but not both at the same time.

The author tries to say 440% cheaper, (not mentioning storage or transfer) and I believe their logic was something along the lines of the below:

- 440% = 440/100

- Cheaper = Reciprocal of More expensive

- 440% cheaper = 1 / (440/100) = 100/440

- S3 is very difficult to estimate a 'per GB price' because it depends on where the data is being transferred to, various pricing tiers (S3, S3 intelligent, 'Glacier', 'infrequent access', 'One Zone', first 100GB free, egress through Cloudfront, and HTTP verb specifics). Fortunately, they have an estimate calculator, which gave me 9 USD for 100GB transferred out to the internet, or 0.09USD/GB for transfer.

- Storage is a different proposition, with Amazon telling me it'll cost 2.30 USD for 100GB as long as I never look at it (ie: 0.023USD/GB)

- Backblaze is much easier to reckon with, with $0.005/GB for storage, and $0.01 for transfer.

- Therefore, for transfer Amazon's 0.09 * (100/440) = 0.02, which is MORE than Backblaze would charge me.

- For storage, Amazon's 0.023 * (100/440) is indeed 0.005.

So, Backblaze does indeed seem to be [440%, reciprocal of more expensive] as Amazon for storage cost alone.

DoctorOW• 5 years ago

This seems more or less like the B2 help document on the matter: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using...

modeless2• 5 years ago

I've been using Cloudflare free in front of App Engine's free tier for a few years and it really seems too good to be true. I can go viral and scale to infinity, for exactly $0.

anaganisk• 5 years ago

The other day one of the commenters under a post wanted to spend $20 per month to host a static website to handle HN traffic, I just LOL’d. I tried to be good and explain why it was so unnecessary but nah they would rather bring a canon to a water gun fight.

anderspitman3• 5 years ago

Yeah a static webserver on a low end VPS is more than sufficient for front page traffic.

indigodaddy2• 5 years ago

Cloudflare in front of Replit or Vercel would be same idea right

modeless2• 5 years ago

Sure. Or a full cloud instance running on a free tier somewhere. There are tons of ways to host low traffic sites for free that can be made to scale to high traffic for free by slapping Cloudflare in front. As long as your site is mostly static.

In my case, I'm serving data that updates every 10 minutes but is otherwise identical for every user. Cloudflare handles that use case perfectly.

ani-ani• 5 years ago

Assuming this is for websites, what's the recommended way of handling cache busting with this kind of setup? The article has a slightly awkward paragraph that tells you to set long TTLs for everything and concludes with "tweak these settings", which kind of sounds like "draw the rest of the owl". Might be a good reason to use something that integrates all this (eg. Cloudflare Pages, since you're already using Cloudflare).

sharps_xp• 5 years ago

cloudflare let’s you purge the cache via API, but frequent busting is probably not okay

ricardobeat2• 5 years ago

The usual approach is to add a value to the query string, like a last-modified timestamp or deployment version. Doesn’t require any setup on the CDN side.

samwillis3• 5 years ago

This B2/CloudFlare combination is a good one.

CloudFlare are about to launch their own object/file store with native CDN called R2. They have even come up with a wonderful trick for migrating to it from S3 and it’s looks like it’s going to have an incredible generous level of free egress. I suspect that it will beat out the B2/CloudFlare combination once it launches.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/

Edit: Typo

outloudvi3• 5 years ago

Yes. Cloudflare is doing many of their own stuffs recently: serverless, image processing, stream processing, mail forwarding, storage etc.

atlgator2• 5 years ago

Cloudflare stock is cheap right now too.

schleck8• 5 years ago

CloudFlair

I wanted to look up whether cloudflair.com was already registered, and apparently the registrar is cloudflare themselves. That's funny

samwillis3• 5 years ago

Ha! Oops, shouldn’t try to do the kids bedtime and write a reply at the same time…

nexuist• 5 years ago

Pretty common strategy. Facebook owns facebok.com, Apple owns aple.com, Google owns gogle.com, etc. Scammers try to buy domains that sound or type similar to legitimate companies (practice known as "typosquatting") and use this to fool customers into thinking they're on the real website. One easy way to combat this is to just pay up and buy all the domains that are "closely typed" to your real one and have them all redirect to your property.

juliosueiras• 5 years ago

funny enough, B2+Cloudflare will still be cheaper, since Cloudflare R2 from the blog you linked is at the cost of $0.015/GB/month for stored storage, where as B2 is $0.005/GB/month for stored storage, and there is no download cost when using the B2+Cloudflare combo

destitude• 5 years ago

Haven't a lot of people on HN warned against using Backblaze for backup because of issues restoring from backup? I recall reading someone having to pay to have a physical drive sent to them to restore a backup because of speed/cost issues trying to restore over network.

hinkley• 5 years ago

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of data tapes hurtling down the highway.

Randall Munroe estimates it'll be 2040 before the Internet has more bandwidth than FedEx: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

celsoazevedo2• 5 years ago

You're probably thinking about their computer backup service. This post talks about B2, an object storage service like S3.

While B2 isn't as fast as S3 and some tasks are way slower (eg: deleting files), I'm able to max out my server's 1Gbps connection when sending or downloading files from their European DC (using rclone and a server also in Europe).

Rastonbury2• 5 years ago

I think it's their consumer facing Dropbox like desktop tool not B2

wrycoder• 5 years ago

They will refund the drive cost when you mail it back.

magicjosh• 5 years ago

Is anyone building CDN service on top of IPFS? IPFS is certainly too slow for many applications but perhaps there are tiny niches where it makes sense today? More like tape drive storage?

yawnxyz• 5 years ago

Cloudflare has a CDN gateway on top, but they don't do pinning (just kidding, you can add a site to IPFS through CF now — edit2: I still don't think they do pinning... really can't tell): https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew...

testesttest• 5 years ago

In my experience their gateway is not great and serves captchas occasionally if you're requesting rare content they don't have cached. I ended up just running my own node at a provider supporting bandwidth alliance and putting cloud flare in front of that.

outloudvi3• 5 years ago

B2-Cloudflare was a great companion when Cloudflare's Bandwidth Alliance was a thing and outgress from B2 to Cloudflare didn't cost anything, which means that outgress was completely free since Cloudflare don't charge on outgress.

ksec• 5 years ago

This reads to me as B2 / Cloudflare are no longer in Bandwidth Alliance?

vlovich123• 5 years ago

Still seems to be listed here: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

timtom39• 5 years ago

Bandwidth Alliance isn't a thing anymore? My deployment is still serving multiple TB a day free. Do you have a link?

ricardobeat2• 5 years ago

Why “was”? Seems like everything you mentioned is still true. It’s the whole point of the post.

outloudvi3• 5 years ago

Oh, that's cool! I once could not find the page so I thought it had stopped.

punnerud• 5 years ago

Does it support byte-range? so it can be used as a “server free” SQLite database: https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-database...

anderspitman3• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure all S3-compatible services support byte ranges. Ready for someone to come out of the woodwork to prove me wrong.

killingtime74• 5 years ago

Yes I’ve used it

anduru_h• 5 years ago

I've been using BunnyCDN - it's been pretty cheap (<$5 month for 250GBs of data transfer).

mike503• 5 years ago

+1 for Bunny, if you cannot take advantage of a free tier somewhere and have to pay. Setup a client of mine on it for video and images, real-time image modifying/branding, smooth video playback (without using a special product) all using the equivalent of presigned URLs - for a surprisingly low amount of money each month. Lots of good stuff going on there.

They also have their own storage options that are tightly integrated to their CDN, but basic FTP and simple API for it still. No S3 or bulk options there yet. Promised S3 API support “soon” though

aantix• 5 years ago

Interesting setup.

And with Rails, it appears that there’s a third party ActiveStorage adapter for BackBlaze.

https://github.com/jeygeethan/activestorage-backblaze

Direct uploading from client : https://github.com/jeygeethan/activestorage-backblaze-javasc...

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

Backblaze also has an S3-compatible API, so you should be able to use the S3 adapter with backblaze too, instaed of the third-party backblaze-specific adpater using backblaze-specific API. You can use either S3 API or Backblaze API with the same bucket, simultaneously even.

dinkleberg• 5 years ago

I know every use case is different, so this may not matter for most. But in my experience, the performance of B2 was quite poor in comparison to other S3 compatible options. It seemed like the crux of the issue was slowness in their API. Generating pre-signed URLs for file upload or download was quite a bit slower, resulting in a poor user experience in my application.

If you're just using it to upload public static content for your site, this shouldn't be an issue. But if you're dealing with private content it probably isn't the optimal solution.

dotancohen3• 5 years ago

I would love to hear more. I had a gig where we considered S3 and B2 for serving very private files (financial records). With B2 I could not find a good way to ensure that, assuming the URL is known, a file could only be accessed by an authorized party.

frogger85• 5 years ago

I am in the same boat currently in my research. In fact I posted this gist link we are discussing. My use case is confidential data and this solution won’t work if I can’t guarantee access is limited to specific users around the country.

Is free, secure, and fast to much to ask? Joking of course.

poxrud2• 5 years ago

You can set the bucket as allPrivate, then use the API to generate a presigned url for the file that you need.

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

Generating pre-signed URLs for file upload or download was quite a bit slower,

I'd be shocked if generating pre-signed URLs required talking to the Backblaze server, that should be something done totally in client code.

However, even with AWS S3, I discovered that the official AWS ruby SDK client was much slower that it could/should be at generating pre-signed URLs (and even just public URLs!), and was able to write my own ruby code to be significantly faster.

https://github.com/jrochkind/faster_s3_url

I'm curious for the specifics on what code you were using to generate pre-signed URLs for file upload or download with backblaze, and what you are comparing it to when you say it's a lot slower. It could be un-optimized code, but whose "fault" it is depends on what code it is, open source etc.

marcodiego• 5 years ago

We have a free CDN. It is called bittorrent.

Dylan168074• 5 years ago

Ah yes, 'CDN at home'.

Sadly people's connections are so asymmetrical they're likely to have problems or get upset from that kind of thing.

ggm• 5 years ago

"if everyone does it, they won't let you do it" -the infinite cache life on CF only works because 99.99% of use of the cache stays in rational cache lifetimes. If everything had long persist, CF would begin cache ejection, and your cost goes up, or they change the ToS to forbid it.

LRU exists for a reason.

binarymax2• 5 years ago

I’m looking at wasabi to host some large (500-1000M) distributable binary files. Anyone have experience with them?

breakingcups• 5 years ago

Quite some caveats. Minimum storage used per month is 1TB. That means, if you store 250MB of files on there you will still be charged for the whole TB. Also, you will be charged for storing those files for at least 90 days even if you only keep them for 1 day. Lastly, and this is a very important one, you only have free egress equaling the total amount of data you have stored. So, say you have 2 TB stored, you can only egress 2 TB that month.

If you start to exceed that limit they are free to suspend your account.

So it depends very much on your use case, but there were too many risks for my use cases.

atlas443• 5 years ago

Yeah, the bandwidth limit was a killer issue for my use case as well. I've heard from older businesses there were exemptions from limit for older enterprise customers but based on a couple sales calls I had with them, they no longer provide any exemption for bandwidth and there is no option to just pay for more bandwidth for any plan. The cost of accounting and having to always predict and significantly overshoot the amount of bandwidth needed easily outweighed any cost benefit wasabi gave for my use case. This seems like a strange limitation that they cant just charge me for max(storage_gb, transfer_gb) but it seems their infrastructure was designed with that limit in mind.

binarymax2• 5 years ago

Thanks! Didn’t see that anywhere on the site.

kondbg• 5 years ago

Using Cloudflare to proxy B2 content seems like it directly violates Cloudflare's ToS.

https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/

2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content
The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services.

If this was truly acceptable and not in some grey area, why doesn't Backblaze simply route all downloads through Cloudflare by default, rather than having each individual customer go through the hassle of setting this up?

cmeacham98• 5 years ago

If you only use this for "standard" CDN assets (like pictures that are part of your website styling rather than as an image host) and you also host your website on Cloudflare, I think it should be ok.

celsoazevedo2• 5 years ago

Backblaze is part of the "Bandwidth Alliance", different rules apply:

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/

With this said, I believe there are restrictions for certain types of content (eg: video). Cloudflare needs to be more clear here to avoid confusion.

webmobdev• 5 years ago

Doesn't this violate net neutrality ... ?

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

The page says that the Bandwidth Alliance means that partners will charge less or no egress to cloudflare.

I'm not seeing it saying anything about different rules applying regarding CloudFlare ToS such as "2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content" to Bandwidth Alliance sources.

But has that been said somewhere I'm not seeing? Would love to see it!

nacs• 5 years ago

If this was truly acceptable and not in some grey area, why doesn't Backblaze simply route all downloads through Cloudflare by default, rather than having each individual customer go through the hassle of setting this up?

Because Backblaze makes more money charging you for repeated downloads?

jcubic• 5 years ago

You can get literally Free CDN using GitHub repo:

https://gist.github.com/jcubic/a8b8c979d200ffde13cc08505f7a6...

onphonenow8• 5 years ago

Some caution with cloudflare:

Because they give a lot away and post blog posts attacking AWS folks think they are cheap. But a lot of their free stuff may be in the marketing budget. The issue here is:

1) Their paid offerings for their core product, CDN, does not have a public pricing guide. That's a BAD sign if they claim to be competing on price. So we can pretty safely assume their paid service bandwidth charges are NOT the 80X cheaper than amazon despite their claims here.

2) They hype their bandwidth alliance. I tried following this up on Azure, it's basically all call a sales person / maybe you'll get a deal type stuff. Smoke and mirrors again.

3) If you actually try to use their CDN to serve something high bandwidth (games / software updates / video streaming) that is going to violate some type of clause which says that the free CDN is not REALLY unlimited.

4) Financially they spend a mind boggling amount on sales costs. Between sales costs and cost of sales I think they are negative relative to revenue.

BTW - If you try any of the other "free" and "unlimited" providers (for $5/month etc) you will also find out once you try to move some real data volumes (video etc) - it's all a lie over and over.

Same things with geo issues. Cloudflare claims to have "one" price globally. These are almost alwyas false claims. It's easy to test - setup a stream into a high cost area, stream a bunch of video there - you'll usually get a call over some tricky TOS issue they pull out.

In short, if you want pay and forget, there is a reason the big cloud players have a business still.

frogger85• 5 years ago

Looking at your comment history, you mention AWS often. Do you work there?

roblabla• 5 years ago

They're one of the top, if not the top, cloud providers. It's not surprising to mention AWS here, and GP also mentions Azure...

onphonenow8• 5 years ago

No.

But I used to play with the "free" and "unlimited" players - and it's almost always the same.

The network quality is crap.

The network cannot sustain bandwidth during periods you need it.

There are hidden TOS stuff (sometimes made up) that they grab you with if you start using "too much" of the "unlimited" free service.

They are losing money so cannot sustain the pricing.

Pricing is opaque or not aligned with underlying costs.

Or they just flat out will not disclose their "80x cheaper" pricing because it's a total lie that it's 80x cheaper.

In short, I'm tired of that as I've gotten older.

Let's take cloudflare. If I egress 1PB of 8K video 100% into India per day, my guess is their per minute "upfront" stream pricing generates a call from some sales dude. Oh, you violated xx/yy/zz, we can't support that etc. Ugh. Same with their CDN stuff. If I start doing 100% egress into South Africa - wham - some weird call. I don't even have to look anymore to know how this goes.

If I strung together all their bandwidth alliance folks and started moving AWS Snowmobile data around per week (100PB per week, distributing it using the bandwidth alliance backbone for "free", without using other significant paid services) you get the call.

I ask simply, where is their 80x cheaper CDN pricing? OH, asking for pricing, you must work for AWS. It's pathetic really - that's the response? Point me to the webpage for this.

Before any discounts for committed use (normally 12 months or more) AWS Cloudfront goes down to $0.02/GB. The supposed 80x cheaper Cloudflare price is then in the $0.0002/GB range. IF you actually believed they had their costs low enough to offer this, they would clean up. Instead it is almost certainly a lie - but I'm happy to be proven wrong. If you do have needs this cheap, you might look at building your own CDN (see Netflix and friends).

The real irony is they do blog posts using AWS pricing, but don't release their own. I use cloudflare, I think they are great as a hobby level user of their stuff. But stuff for work goes to GCP (in past) and more recently AWS and Azure (which has a big in these days with office 365 / directory / remote desktop stuff into bigger players despite what may be underlying tech weaknesses).

rileymat2• 5 years ago

Point 3 is very true, however as far as competing on price, CloudFlare was a fraction of the cost of cloudfront when we had priced it out, despite the nontransparent pricing.

WM9t27Ta4• 5 years ago

Enterprise customer here. throw away account, since not sure how much I should be able to divulge...

1: we are paying (ballpark) 5-10k for our account. We have 5-10 domains on the enterprise plan, and we have roughly 100m requests per month plus about 70TB bandwidth, IIRC... Mind you, we have other sites that are on Pro ($20) or business ($200) plans and they are coming in at around a million requests a day (only about 2-3Gb a day) and no one complains.. could be the 5-10k we spend a month with them makes them think twice... Most of our cost is for the 24/7 tech support, regular meetings, etc. extra domains are a somewhat fixed cost (little over double a business plan domain) and that gives us extra features.

2: for Azure and BW Alliance, we were told you need to use a storage account and use "Internet Routing" not "Azure Routing" for the account. Azure routing is, IIRC, 12c per Gig. Internet routing is closer to 8c... Cant see an option for Servers, but I think Internet Routing might work for them too...

3: Any proof of this? I do know there is a limit of 256Mbyte for free account files, but not sure about what the limits on Pro or Business accounts...

4: https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2021/Cloudflare-Ann... Seems they spend nearly double on Sales and Marketing than they do on R&D... and they seem to be currently loosing money, but what startup doesn't lose money for the first few years?

[Edit: formatting]

SmellTheGlove• 5 years ago

I love cloudflare, but related to your last point can they still be called a startup? They’re a publicly traded company whose stock price is currently in freefall.

coolspot• 5 years ago

Offtopic, but 12c per gig of transit traffic sounds like microSD price for storage.

onphonenow8• 5 years ago

Thank you for an actual price data point!

For those following along, the aws cloud front price for 70 TB / 100m requests runs $5,400 or so. Discounts available if you will do a one year term - say 20%. Ie, they are in ballpark.

I can believe cloudflare is cheaper for sure, but it’s not your an idiot for using aws level I don’t think. And aws is printing money.

I once paid $3 per GB (6 figures per year) way way back so this all looks cheap to me.

WM9t27Ta4• 5 years ago

Found the link to How To on Azure and the Bandwidth alliance:

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/44072079721...

And azure's Pricing is here:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/...

Its not 12c per gig, its 8.75c per gig for Microsoft Routing... (at least from Europe and NA) and 8c for Internet Routing... Not a massive saving... Mind you, if you are based in South America, you go from 18.1c per gig down to 12...

For Us, mostly based in Europe, it would be a difference of around 995 per month on Azure Bandwidth costs, if all our bandwidth just came from Azure. Same for South America is 6 grand in savings...

judge2020• 5 years ago

To summarize your point, yes, Cloudflare is not entirely free for all. Cloudflare specifically states why they have this sort of model, from their S-1 [0]:

Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security, performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paid customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a “virtual quality assurance” function that allows us to maintain a high rate of product innovation, while ensuring products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to enterprise customers.

That's the value they get for providing the service for 'free' for quite a lot of websites that aren't moving real data volumes. For millions of websites, this is a sweet deal for them since it still saves them hundreds of dollars in bandwidth a month while they provide enough value to CF indirectly to not be considered a loss-leading customer (in which the customer would get "the call" saying they need to start directly paying for their usage of CF).

So is it an opaque, customer-hostile pricing strategy? Sure, but even image boards doing petabytes a month serving images are within the realm of never needing to pay for their direct usage of the service since CF still sees that as a worthwhile marketing and intelligence source. It's only when you actively cause them to lose money (such as streaming video in eg. the Oceania region) or start proxying raw binaries on a domain that proxies nothing else [1] that CF doesn't see a reason to keep your domain around as a charity case.

0: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...

1: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwi...

onphonenow8• 5 years ago

Why is Oceania so expensive? Is it getting the data in country (long fiber routes) or a local issue?

nerdbaggy• 5 years ago

The amount of sales calls and PowerPoints are crazy with CloudFlare. AWS makes it soooooo much easier to spend money and their sales are so less naggy.

mathattack• 5 years ago

They don’t list because they are still in the “what the market will bear” model of pricing.

My experience was their sales team talked a good game up until the time to bid, and then Akamai closed enough of the pricing gap to not make it worth switching. Cloudflare seemed like great technology but their pricing suggested they had already won the business. I can only imagine how they treat existing customers once there are switching costs.

manigandham• 5 years ago

"does not have a public pricing guide"

Most of their pricing is public: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/

This includes the CDN product, workers, security services like Access and Teams. Only the Enterprise plan and other products require negotiation, but the majority of customers are easily covered by the standard options.

"high bandwidth (games / software updates / video streaming) that is going to violate some type of clause"

The clauses are publicly stated in their terms. The CDN is for typical website assets and not large files, but many sites are running TBs of bandwidth for free or with the regulars plans though. Large file delivery requires different technical setup from small/dynamic requests, and there are CDNs specialized for that. You can also rent unmetered servers or interconnects yourself and get much better rates instead of using a CDN.

sixhobbits• 5 years ago

I have been very happy with DigitalOcean spaces for $5/month including 250GB storage, 1TB outbound, and custom domains. Seems like something more closely comparable to this set up so I am surprised it isn't part of the comparison.

aftbit• 5 years ago

I've done this by using Cloudflare Workers. I can confirm that I did not see any bandwidth charges at B2, although I've only tested a few GB of transit. Likely if you tried to host brew here, you'd get yelled at.

Set up a practically free CDN

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