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Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

lexx.gr

61–70 of 124 posts

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#61

I read the terms before signing up with cloudflare for any of my sites, and it was quite clear it's not meant to be used as an image proxy > 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…

Is js considered as non-html?

Right, a SPA is like 1% HTML and rest JS and CSS and some images. Maybe that's what they mean by "or other functional equivalents"

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#63

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 e…

It’s not clear to me that running an image host (or, say, something like NPM or CPAN) on cloudflare is allowed, even if you’re serving it using (paid) workers and R2 and not using them as a proxy at all.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, my point really is that it’s difficult to tell.

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#65

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…

If they did offer all-inclusive image caching as a product, how much storage would they end up deploying?

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#66

I read the terms before signing up with cloudflare for any of my sites, and it was quite clear it's not meant to be used as an image proxy > 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…

Iirc, Cloudflare offers image caching through their CDN service. So it’s not like they don’t allow it at all. You just need to pay for it.

Yes, jumping up to the Business tier is usually enough to ensure you won't get suspended[0].

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[1]:

> 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://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwi... (they were suspended for proxying over 140TB of a bunch of archive files/binary files over the course of 15 days)

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

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#67
post #54
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not saying I am right. I did break the TOS. They have the right to do what they did. It's just not nice and I don't like them anymore :)

Er, so do you run around and dive in pools when the rule boards posted everywhere explicitly list those as forbidden, then get mad when you get kicked out?

That's exactly what I do in pools. On my case though I haven't read the TOS. And I would really appreciate a warning. Also, as I have already said, it's not clear when and how you are considered an image proxy. There is no way to know or monitor it. Do you consider any website with images breaking the TOS, or because we have a separate subdomain with images makes this a problem.

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is js considered as non-html?

Right, a SPA is like 1% HTML and rest JS and CSS and some images. Maybe that's what they mean by "or other functional equivalents"

> Maybe that's what they mean by "or other functional equivalents"

Yeah, but I think that js can be considered as a "functional equivalent" to HTML only when Browser APIs are used

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iirc, Cloudflare offers image caching through their CDN service. So it’s not like they don’t allow it at all. You just need to pay for it.

Yes, jumping up to the Business tier is usually enough to ensure you won't get suspended[0]. 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[1]: > 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…

TFA explicitly says they're on the Pro plan, ie they're not a free customer. And good job spamming the same incorrect comment in the thread multiple times.

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#70
This post would have much more credibility if the use-case that triggered the ban was described:

"all my subdomains that operate as image proxies are banned"

That sounds anywhere from perfectly reasonable to completely shady. Writing a post like this and not providing any additional detail on what you were actually doing to trigger the ToS boot leads me (for one) to believe elaboration on your use case would harm your argument, any sympathizing, etc.

From what I've seen before in many cases Cloudflare uses the "non-html content is disproportionate to html content" ToS clause as a catch-all to boot customers they don't like for one reason or another, are wildly "expensive" from a bandwidth standpoint, etc. As many have pointed out here on HN it doesn't even really fundamentally make sense and most websites, by nature, are going to consume more bandwidth with JS/SVG/PNG/etc vs HTML.

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