Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

Yeah unlimited does have it's limita....OMG you're funneling 1.8 petabytes?!?!! That's like 1,800,000 gigabytes or 1,800 terabytes every month. EVERY MONTH. Unlimited does not mean you can serve the bandwidth of a small country through 1 ISP.

"Please contact us if you have a CDN that is capable and willing of serving 1.8 Petabytes of outgoing traffic per month free of charge," -PostImage

Is the company run by spoiled entitled millennials? It takes a lot of equipment and staff to create a network that can serve that and they just want it all for under $1k? You know data centers have costs too. Other startups spend years of their lives putting together a team that can assemble infrastructure to handle that and they want it for free? For their barely-cash-flow-positive project that doesn't earn them a decent living...

I can't believe they just asked that. Sorry but PostImage sounds like the biggest moocher in the web right now. If your ISP provider says "unlimited data" does that mean you can funnel the traffic of Russia through your internet connection? You want for "free" what others are paying thousands and thousands of dollars for?

What is wrong with you? Seriously? It's like you're trying to run a top-tier web company on pocket change.

> If your ISP provider says "unlimited data" does that mean you can funnel the traffic of Russia through your internet connection?

I mean, yeah. Unmetered+uncapped bandwidth is a dumb idea that creates bad incentives, and anyone offering it deserve to be punished by abusers until they rescind their offer.

If people can't proxy all of Russia through your LTE data plan—or serve a billion image hotlinks per day through your caching reverse-proxy—then you should put that in the contracts you make them sign. That's what contracts are for. Say precisely where you're drawing the line, or you don't get to complain when people act as if you haven't drawn one.

Probably don't need years to make a team capable of serving 10-20Gbps of static content.

I do wonder what they thought would happen. CF's ToS are very clear. Why did they think they have a project, let alone a business?

Because some developers have an unreasonable expectation of what services should cost, and why those costs exist for real underlying resources.

Recall the uproar of that open source project that was breaking a piece of Github's infrastructure, and even when Github explained politely how to properly architect the fix, people were upset the project was going to need to pay for a CDN for their binaries.

Because early in the negotiation phase CF sales rep said that a $1k/mo plan would be a good enough upgrade, and this was an unpleasant but a sustainable figure.

I agree, but to be fair, I think "unlimited anything" is almost always misleading, Why not advertise with a generous free tier with clear limits?

Because if it was static human readable text content, they'd let you push that much though just fine. It's unlikely that you ever would get to that level, but they don't mind if you do.

Services offer this because if you don't have any users, it's easier than building in and enforcing limits. If your service gets traction then it makes sense to spend the time and money on development, not before. I personally wasted a lot of time on building limits for a service that has yet to gain traction.

People say "unlimited rates" but what they really mean is "indefinite rates".

I'm glad we figured out how to pin this on millennials.

Exactly, the real culprit here are either the baby boomers for spoiling us or gen z kids who grew up on freemium tier cloud services.

While I agree with the main thrust of your post, a couple of things jumped out. First, Cloudflare is a CDN, not an ISP. Second, 1.8 Petabytes per month is 5.48 Gigabytes per month. That is alot, but it isn't THAT much. For comparison, CDN's occasionally handle several orders of magnitued more traffic (although admittedly not for cheap).

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