Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

jpetazzo.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 136 posts

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#121

Post by CharlesW »

localfirst wrote: post #118
CharlesW wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iDrive pricing seems too good to be true, their focus is clearly consumers (which they target with shady "90% off for your first year" gimmicks), and I can't find any write-ups by developers using it for real products. Can you point me to anything which supports that they're a real option for more than consumer/developer hobbyist use?

its s3 compatible so there should be no hurdle in using it the price is their strong point but you shouldn't use S3 or any of the sort for any critical stuff in the first place. reply to comment below: if you require S3 support more than once a year then you definitely should not be using idrive but for the rest of us who don't need that idrive is a great alternative! You are most welcome ^_^

If that’s what you think, their S3 support must be truly garbage-level. That tracks, thank you!

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#122

Post by Aeolun »

theamk wrote: post #97
ffsm8 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Egress was pretty much always unmetered until AWS came along. And it still is with most providers other then the usual suspects (AWS,azure, Google cloud)

unmetered != unlimited There might not be precise measurement system which bills you by the byte, but many provides monitor (or periodically sample) bandwidth utilization, so and using too much data will catch someone's attention. Example from Hetzer, which claims to provide "unlimited" traffic. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/180504/hetzner-traffic-use... > We will routinely check your traffic use. If we continue…

That’s wonky. If their normal servers include 20TB, why would they consider 250TB on their ‘unlimited’ servers too much. Makes you wonder who they think opts for unlimited servers. If 20TB was enough they clearly wouldn’t.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#123

Post by spott »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #44
Scaevolus wrote: post #6

I clicked assuming this was analyzing how hilariously expensive Images is compared to most of their offerings, but it's about how hilariously bad Images' payment structure is. Nice! > It’s likely that we will replace Cloudflare Images in the long run. Looking at storage costs alone, S3 would be 4 times less expensive for our use-case. Cloudflare R2 would likely be a good choice too, if you're willing to bet that the…

I'd recommend just going on-premise for storage. You can build a full system with more than enough RAID-1 storage which will have 100% ROI in a few months compared to what they're supposed to pay for Cloudflare Images. Just use that as a storage backend for your webservers in the cloud.

Where are you going to put this box?

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#124

Post by mik3y »

danielskogly wrote: post #91

I've written about the issues with CF Images before[0], and a lot of these issues still remain. A while back they joined their two image resizing products together though, and now CF Images is basically a hosted version of the previously named "Image Resizing", but weirdly (though for some use-cases great) priced, and you can bring your own storage if you so like. In my opinion, CF Images is best if you use it with a…

I refer back to your exact blog post every 6 months or so to see how (or if) its various issues have been smoothed out, and whether I should recommend it in a new build. Thanks much for keeping your post up-to-date!

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#125

Post by adityapatadia »

shrubble wrote: post #109
adityapatadia wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Founder of Gumlet.com here (we serve more than 2 billion images per day). Here are the reasons image processing on VPS is hard. - Reliability and uptime is a huge concern. If service goes down, images can show broken - When you build it yourself, you pay for image processing, bandwidth AND developer time. image processing at multiple terabytes and half a million image processed is not trivial ( inputs can be crazy an…

Is there really market demand for AVIF and JXL , and from what market segments?

AVIF and JXL can be upto 30% smaller than webp. E-commerce and news media companies have ton of images and 30% is a huge savings for them.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#126

Post by throw10920 »

jgrahamc wrote: post #49
Scaevolus wrote: post #6

I clicked assuming this was analyzing how hilariously expensive Images is compared to most of their offerings, but it's about how hilariously bad Images' payment structure is. Nice! > It’s likely that we will replace Cloudflare Images in the long run. Looking at storage costs alone, S3 would be 4 times less expensive for our use-case. Cloudflare R2 would likely be a good choice too, if you're willing to bet that the…

if you're willing to bet that the (inevitable?) shakedown for money once you find the limits of "unlimited egress with no fees" won't be too bad. R2 egress is free. There's no shakedown. If you look at https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage (the original announcement) we said many times that egress is free. That's sort of R2's whole thing! See also: https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/r2/…

Is there a reason you decided to make it "free" in your marketing instead of "free up to some (absurdly) high volume, and then cheap"? The former seems suspicion-inducing (consumers are familiar with many things that are "free*", such as "unlimited" mobile wireless plans), and would make for worse PR if/when you have a corporate customer that pushes the limits of what's profitable for you and you have to throttle/charge/cut them. The latter provides a clearly-visible data limit for "free" that's still high enough that everyone except the tiniest fraction of your customers will never even get close. If anything, I'd expect that "100 PB free a month" would be awe-inspiring and good PR.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#127

Post by ddorian43 »

ssijak wrote: post #92
adityapatadia wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

S3 costs seem low at start but their data transfer is very expensive at volume (~10 cent per GB) It's almost always best to use some sort of image processing service (like Gumlet.com) to optimise images and then pay lower per GB bandwidth costs.

S3 is not a CDN

Their CDN is expensive too.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#128

Post by matteocontrini »

bgentry wrote: post #88
zaidf wrote: post #35

(I work on the Images product at Cloudflare) While I continue to dig in to the specifics of the billing and support issues described, I can confirm this bit from the blog post: if you stored 2 million images and delivered 1 million images, your total cost for that month for the Images product should be ~$210, not $400+ I've reached out to the author to get some additional information which will help me investigate th…

It seems like the author already went above and beyond to try to get this resolved through the proper channels. Why did it take an HN front page post to get it actually looked into? It does not inspire confidence in your service.

The thing is that Cloudflare has no proper channels. Anyone that has tried Cloudfare's support (even as a paying customer) knows that it's almost impossible to get a sensible answer to anything.

I wrote about it here last year: https://matteosonoio.it/cloudflare-support/

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#129

Post by jgrahamc »

csande17 wrote: post #56
jgrahamc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you're willing to bet that the (inevitable?) shakedown for money once you find the limits of "unlimited egress with no fees" won't be too bad. R2 egress is free. There's no shakedown. If you look at https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage (the original announcement) we said many times that egress is free. That's sort of R2's whole thing! See also: https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/r2/…

If Cloudflare really is serious about this for R2, that's going to be difficult for them to communicate in a trustworthy way. Their other products (in particular their flagship DDOS mitigation service) definitely seem to operate on a "free, but if your site is large enough you'll get an email from salespeople threatening to disconnect you unless you pay $$$" basis, using the boilerplate "don't overburden our servers"…

"Unmetered Mitigation: DDoS Protection Without Limits"

https://blog.cloudflare.com/unmetered-mitigation/

"Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71 million request-per-second DDoS attack"

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-mitigates-record-brea...

"Mitigating a 754 Million PPS DDoS Attack Automatically"

https://blog.cloudflare.com/mitigating-a-754-million-pps-ddo...

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#130

Post by csande17 »

jgrahamc wrote: post #129
csande17 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Cloudflare really is serious about this for R2, that's going to be difficult for them to communicate in a trustworthy way. Their other products (in particular their flagship DDOS mitigation service) definitely seem to operate on a "free, but if your site is large enough you'll get an email from salespeople threatening to disconnect you unless you pay $$$" basis, using the boilerplate "don't overburden our servers"…

"Unmetered Mitigation: DDoS Protection Without Limits" https://blog.cloudflare.com/unmetered-mitigation/ "Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71 million request-per-second DDoS attack" https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-mitigates-record-brea... "Mitigating a 754 Million PPS DDoS Attack Automatically" https://blog.cloudflare.com/mitigating-a-754-million-pps-ddo...

You've posted these links without much context, but yes, I do think Cloudflare does a pretty good job of backing up the specific claim that they'll absorb a large, random DDoS attack for you. (Although it doesn't seem like the attack in your last link could even have been attributed to any specific customer in the first place.)

Where things start to get shaky is if your site uses a lot of bandwidth for legitimate traffic, or otherwise uses the service in an unusual way. Personally I see it like an old shared hosting plan that will probably let you use some burst capacity if you get Slashdotted, but operates under a vague shared understanding that the service is only for "normal websites". (Which includes a lot of policies and content guidelines that only become problems if you show up on someone's "sort by usage descending" dashboard.)

I think publishing a specific amount of bandwidth that customers are allowed to consume would go a long way to putting R2 in the former category. Maybe that number is your maximum object size multiplied by your GET request limit, maybe it's your current total network capacity, maybe it's eight octillion zottabits per second.

Post reply on HN