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Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

lexx.gr

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Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#71

Post by hk__2 »

> We use Imageboss for all our image manipulation needs. During our migration out of cloudflare we had some difficulties with their service. I reached out to them and within an hour they helped us go through this migration and really saved the day for us. A really huge "thank you" to Igor for treating use with professionalism.

Ironically, weren’t these difficulties due to Imageboss being itself blocked by Cloudflare? [1].

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/igorescobar_cloudflare-just-b...

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#72

Post by celsoazevedo »

habibur wrote: post #44

TIL : the free cloudflare proxies will serve your static HTML files only, and you need to host your images elsewhere.

You can get away with using a few TBs/month on the free plan if you also serve a healthy share of html content (static or dynamic). For example, a normal blog where images are part of the content will be fine.

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#73

Post by judge2020 »

Arnavion wrote: post #69
judge2020 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I address that - $200/mo is a lot more than the $20/mo a pro plan costs, which is why upgrading to Business might've been enough, depending on the traffic levels of the service in question. But if your service is pushing terabytes of images or billions of requests, you're costing CF a lot more than they're getting back (in both money and a stronger network presence). Pretty much every booru gets away with paying $200/mo to Cloudflare for pushing likely 20TB/day minimum with a lot of it cached (thus saving them on bandwidth costs to their main image hosting provider).

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#74

Post by Arnavion »

judge2020 wrote: post #42
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 e…

As I told you in the other comment in this thread that you copy-pasted from this one, they're not a free customer.

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#75

Post by furyofantares »

qwertyforce wrote: post #55
furyofantares wrote: post #16

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?

The gist is (to me) clearly that you're not meant to be effectively reselling cloudflare's own service. It's being sold (or given freely) under the assumption that it's largely used to build something else, not to build another CDN.

EDIT: There's questions downthread if I've misunderstood ImageBoss's role here. I think ImageBoss was also blocked by CloudFlare recently and separately and is not OP's website.

OP's website (imageboss) looks pretty rad, you can host images and have all sorts of derivative transformations that are done by imageboss and cached for you.

But it's functioning as a CDN (and boasts unlimited transformations, requests and bandwidth, which I think we all know is not actually possible.)

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#76

Post by lexx »

hk__2 wrote: post #71

> We use Imageboss for all our image manipulation needs. During our migration out of cloudflare we had some difficulties with their service. I reached out to them and within an hour they helped us go through this migration and really saved the day for us. A really huge "thank you" to Igor for treating use with professionalism. Ironically, weren’t these difficulties due to Imageboss being itself blocked by Cloudflare?…

Ironically this did happen but it was a coincidence. They banned us one day later. They did not mention in their tickets anything related to that.

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#77

Post by andmarios »

Although it is not clear from the blog post, I think what the author did, was to use an old technique for blogs, where you would serve images under many different subdomains. You did this in order to force the web browsers to deeply parallelize the requests, as browsers used to limit to around 4 concurrent requests per domain IIRC. This was pre-HTTP2/QUIC era, and it made a huge difference, as a website could have tens or hundreds of requests per page.

There were even specialized wordpress plugins to take care of this. You just assigned multiple subdomains to your website and the plugin would round-robin the subdomain each image would come from.

If this is indeed the case, then we are in a gray area, where he did and did not violate cloudflare's rules at the same time.

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#78

Post by lmeyerov »

We're quite interested in a related case here of byte-addressable CDN caching of data table reads for web-scale publishing. So right in that gray area of web publishing. Imagine something like an infinite on-demand parquet table scrolling UI on the NYT website. S3 supports this quite cleanly for internal use, but not for web publishing, where a CDN is needed for the typical hot reads.

So the question is which CDN would make sense for fronting that, both technically and, as seen here, wrt ToS. If not cloudflare... who?

---

(Also, if you're into building such experiences, we're looking for a platform engineering owner to help build out our global gpu network!)

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#79

Post by drowsspa »

advisedwang wrote: post #53
drowsspa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree, I think they should set some more objective limits.

Setting a specific limit is going to result in people pushing up as close to the line as possible, instead of holding to the spirit of the policy.

For free customers, that's okay I guess, but not for paying ones.

Re: Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving

#80

Post by furyofantares »

lexx wrote: post #67
florbo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's fair that you would appreciate a warning.

In the blog post your claim that "small businesses cannot depend on huge providers like google or cloudflare" may or may not be right, but it's absolutely not evidenced by you not reading the TOS.

I suppose you're also right that there's no way to monitor whether you would be considered an image proxy. I would appreciate more clarity on that myself.

It's extremely clear in your case though. You said it yourself, "all my subdomains that operate as image proxies are banned."

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