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Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

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Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#41

Post by c0balt »

sidcool wrote: post #20
pkulak wrote: post #10

Break the terms of service, get mad and write a blog post. It's not even hidden in some legalese; they tell you not to serve majority image/video content _everywhere_ in the UI. All my tunnels are still running great, for free. I could not be happier.

Genuinely curious. Why does Cloudflare prevent that?

Images and Videos tend, in comaprison to text, consume a lot of data even if compressed. This additional data leads to a stark increase in bandwidth usage when accessing a video compared to, e.g., a (text) blog. Because cloudflare is the one handling most of the bandwidth usage and routing this amounts to a significant cost for them (more servers, bigger pipes, ...).

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#42

Post by judge2020 »

TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #8

These are the nightmare stories for me. So much of the internet depends on these worldwide CDNs that people are bullied into using by DDoS attackers, which, in turn, allows these companies to have a chokehold. Cloudflare is a "global network built for the cloud" that.... doesn't allow images? Really? They have partnerships with Backblaze and Wasabi, object storage providers, but wont allow images to be served over th…

Even before r2 they didn't allow sites like image hosting or video hosting.

The point of Cloudflare is that hosting your website for free is a service, and you "pay" for that service in strengthening their network; from their S-1[0]:

> Free customers are an important part of our business. .. Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees.... 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.

Your theoretical cost as a free customer is outweighed by the positive effects of protecting over 10% of websites on the internet, largely for free. Now, if you run a free video site proxying all your multimedia stream segments to serve pirated movies, or create a site dedicated to user image uploads and quickly balloon to serving hundreds of terabytes a day at the expense of Cloudflare, your value to the network is trumped by how much you're actively costing them in uplink costs and risk exposure.

0: https://gist.github.com/judge2020/e49138d588950167b736c630aa...

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#45

Post by John23832 »

phpisatrash wrote: post #14

The only thing I keep using from cloudflare is their DNS service. I know this is not related to the post, but I tried to use workers for a few times, specifically the Cron workers. However it never worked as it should. My Cron was never triggered. And then, when I contacted their support throught the community, theirs mods seemed to basically don't care that Cron workers don't work. I tried and did everything the sup…

Their support is really trash. There's a lot of "go to the forums", and you go there and get ignored.

We had issues with ZeroTrust and could get literally ZeroHelp. We were told the ZeroTrust team doesn't monitor the forums (which were where we were told by support to go for help, lol).

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#47

Post by geerlingguy »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #23
jsnell wrote: post #6

So how much bandwidth were you using, and what proportion of it was images? Like, is it a obviously cut and dry case or is there actually some ambiguity? (There's some very good reasons to leave terms a bit vague rather than specified exactly, but then you probably wouldn't expect enforcement in cases that are ambiguous.)

Tell me one web site where images and video doesn’t count for most of the size. The time of 35k image on a 50k text page is long gone.

Just a guess, but I'm wondering if it's more about their system detecting someone serving almost entirely image requests, versus someone serving 20-40 images per web page, a pattern more consistent with images served alongside a web page.

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#48

Post by cortesoft »

sidcool wrote: post #20
pkulak wrote: post #10

Break the terms of service, get mad and write a blog post. It's not even hidden in some legalese; they tell you not to serve majority image/video content _everywhere_ in the UI. All my tunnels are still running great, for free. I could not be happier.

Genuinely curious. Why does Cloudflare prevent that?

I don't fully know, but I am guessing because Cloudflare doesn't charge for bandwidth, only requests... non-html content is going to be more data per request, which might not fit into their cost model.

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#49

Post by judge2020 »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #32
Alifatisk wrote: post #2

Cloudflare, to me, is seen as worlds largest mitm.

"mitm" strongly implies Cloudflare is somehow unauthorized, like they're slipping in and hijacking the connection. I know why Cloudflare detractors use this type of intentionally misleading language, but can we maybe say something like "worlds largest _proxy_" that is more accurate?

Maybe not even the largest proxy by volume. Akamai and Google Cloud load balancers serve bigger customers with comparable, if not more overall bandwidth. Cloudflare only puts out stats for "percentage of websites"[0], which includes all of the random blogs that get less than 1k views a day.

0: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/statistically-speaking-wh...

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#50

Post by dijit »

sp332 wrote: post #7
Alifatisk wrote: post #2

Cloudflare, to me, is seen as worlds largest mitm.

Yeah? People use MITM because it has large benefits.

This line of reasoning is poor.

Taken to horrible extremes: Slavery has large benefits.

Even if not taken to extremes, we're talking about the same argument that erodes privacy; "We need to take away your freedom so that the terrorists can't groom your children and bomb your daycare centers!".

I can't even begin to steelman an argument like this, it's just poorly reasoned out.

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