131–140 of 220 posts
Can you use R2 to host a static website as easily as you can with S3?
To host static websites, you use Cloudflare Pages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have, I've also taken a look at Mux. Both would be fantastic options, and I'm still considering them, but I don't have many films and I'm biased towards distributing the original high-quality encodes. Both of these services significantly reduce the file-size with a re-encode, even if they promote an "impercievable quality loss". They seem to be more suited to high traffic on-demand streaming for websites, promotion…
What format, bitrate, and resolution are your video outputs? Or just a length and file size of one that’s handy. (I’m a streaming video engineer and curious.) Reduction in file size from re-encoding doesn’t mean there will be perceivable loss in quality. Your videos should almost certainly not require the kind of bandwidth that you mention unless your deliverables are higher-quality than those from, say, Netflix :) F…
I encode H.264/AAC for compatibility, usually 2-pass at 8Mbit/s for FHD content or around 30Mbit/s for UHD, 256-320 kbps for AAC. This gives a size of 1-4 GB per video. My Dad worked in broadcast, gave me those figures 10 years ago, I generally stick by them for any work I'm proud of!
You are right, that bitrate absolutely isn't necessary :D , and there are better codecs too. I don't have more than 17 films at the moment, the whole backend costs me about 4 euros a month on Hetzner with an attached 32 GB of block storage, no bandwidth costs (300Mbit/s max), single-core running Node.js and Nginx.
I make films during travel and events, and share them with friends and family who were there and for who it has some intrinsic value. They're mostly personal, not just for consumption. Short compilations that I would like to keep for the future, like old photos. Hence why people watch (and hopefully rewatch!) them on a TV and don't mind the wait.
Buffer-less streaming is absolutely not a priority (although nowadays I think it's more expected, people have shorter attention spans, despite the hours of work that goes into a short travel film). It's a very niche case, but would have cost me at least $50 in bandwidth alone with the big three. It's not going to break the bank, but it's also unnecessary.
You don't usually notice the drop in quality on YouTube or Netflix, until you actually try working with high quality source footage (high-bitrate from a dedicated camera, not phone footage). Then it's very noticeable (purple/green flickering on even surfaces from chroma subsampling, I'm guessing), and makes you sad when you realise what everyone is missing!
If you're still curious, my website is still live. I beg you not to judge, I started making short films very young and never got very good at them either (I'm studying nanotech & engineering, no film career for me)!
Not sure why this is more appealing than Wasabi? As far as I can see, Wasabi is cheaper, has great speeds, fantastic S3 compatibility, their dashboard is a joy to use so what is the actual "special" thing here? I mean sure, it's a good thing to have more competition but the way everyone here is describing the situation makes it seem as if Cloudflare is going to be the cheapest & the best.
This is interesting ... For the longest time we tried to convince people that they should have an off-amazon archive of their S3 data ... we even ran an ads to that effect in 2012[1]. The (obvious) reason this isn't compelling is the cost of egress. It's just (relatively) too expensive to offload your S3 assets to some third party on a regular basis. So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value propositio…
> So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value proposition again. Isn't B2 from Backblaze already filling that need? I means more choice is always better for sure, but considering R2 goal seems really to be a CDN more than a backup space and it does feel like their money maker is in the CDN part, not the storage part... I feel like trusting them to store it long-term without using the CDN part is a little…
Eg: my employer already has stuff on clouflare, using their services is just as easy as pulling their terraform provider. OTOH, for backblaze, I'd have to go through the whole evaluation process, security and legal compliance etc etc...
For those who don't want to wait, there's DigitalOcean Spaces ( https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/ ). Disclaimer: I haven't used it, but planning to, since I already use their VPS.
This is interesting ... For the longest time we tried to convince people that they should have an off-amazon archive of their S3 data ... we even ran an ads to that effect in 2012[1]. The (obvious) reason this isn't compelling is the cost of egress. It's just (relatively) too expensive to offload your S3 assets to some third party on a regular basis. So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value propositio…
> So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value proposition again. Isn't B2 from Backblaze already filling that need? I means more choice is always better for sure, but considering R2 goal seems really to be a CDN more than a backup space and it does feel like their money maker is in the CDN part, not the storage part... I feel like trusting them to store it long-term without using the CDN part is a little…
Very generous offer from Cloudflare. I signed up. The main question: how can Cloudflare make this into a sustainable business? * cost/gb is cheaper or same as s3, gcp, azure * no egress charges to customers, but they still have to pay for transit when they cross an AS! what is the hidden angle Cloudfare is using here?
That's their advantage -- a global network that only exits to the local AS.
This is interesting ... For the longest time we tried to convince people that they should have an off-amazon archive of their S3 data ... we even ran an ads to that effect in 2012[1]. The (obvious) reason this isn't compelling is the cost of egress. It's just (relatively) too expensive to offload your S3 assets to some third party on a regular basis. So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value propositio…
> So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value proposition again. That doesn't appear to be what they're doing, they don't seem to have changed their existing operating model at all: > R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a threshold — currently planned to be in the single digit requests per second range. Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major pro…
The announcement says that they're eliminating bandwidth charges three times.
I don't know the whole economics around cloud storage and bandwidth so maybe this is unrealistic pricing and your suspicions are well founded. However, Backblaze seems is offering storage at $0.005/GB and bandwidth at $0.01/GB. Cloudflare is charging 3x more than Backblaze for the storage and $0 for the bandwidth. Given that Cloudflare's costs are probably lower than Backblaze for bandwidth, that doesn't seem so unreasonable - but I could be very wrong.
I think Cloudflare probably sees R2 as something that is sustainable, but creates demand for their enterprise products. You start The NextBigThing with R2 and suddenly your application servers are under attack. You have a relationship with Cloudflare, you're used to their control panel, you trust them, and when you're at the scale that you're getting attacked like this you can drop $10,000/mo because you're bringing in a bunch of revenue - $10,000/mo is less than 1 software engineer in the US.
R2, in a certain way, can be a marketing tool. "Come use our S3 competitor with free bandwidth rather than getting locked into AWS's transfer pricing." 6-12 months go by and you're substantially larger and want more complex stuff and you're already getting emails from Cloudflare about their other offerings, you see them in the control panel, etc.
It seems like Cloudflare might be trying to move in on AWS's market. R2 is an easy way for them to do it. It seems like S3 has high margins. Competing storage services can be a fraction of the cost per GB and AWS's bandwidth markup is incredibly high. If you're looking to attack a competitor's market, it seems like going after one of their highest-margin product could make the most sense. Again, R2 becomes a marketing tool for future cloud offerings.
Part of Cloudflare's strategy might be targeting things that they see very high margins on and being willing to accept lower margins. If something has 50% margins and you're willing to accept 20% margins, you're still doing pretty great. Plus, over time, the cost of hardware comes down and you can keep your prices at the same level once people are happily inside your ecosystem and don't want to deal with migrations.
> CloudFlare bandwidth is some of the most expensive available
It sounds like you might have gotten burned by something with Cloudflare. I don't have any horror stories, but I'm always interested in new data points if you have them.