Hacker News Reader

Comment by bubaflub | Hacker News Reader

Why isn’t Cloudflare listed? They don’t charge for bandwidth so I suppose they’d always be the cheapest.

I run a local news site with ~ 1.3 TB/month traffic on two cheap VPSs and a free Cloudflare account (paying just for a non-shared SSL certificate, $5 per month). It saves us about 95 % of bandwidth.

According to the calculator, the other options would cost from $12000 to $250000. This is roughly cost for 35 - 730 years of all our current services combined (CF cert, 2x VPS, domain). Looking at the detailed pricing, it might be affected by me being in Europe, but still…

Re. some sibling comments – never got any e-mail from CF suggesting to move to their paid plan.

Cloudflare has a file size limit (512MB) and only caches certain file extensions so for things like binary files, installers, and video it will not cache. For the HTML/CSS/JS asset use case it’s perfectly fine though.

If you use a lot of bandwidth a CF sales person contacts you and tells you it’s time to pay.

And it’s not cheap. More expensive than Fastly in our case (though we went with Google CDN and saved a bunch of money and got better performance).

Any idea where this limit is? 1TB? 10? 100?

I run a site in cloudflare that's using a little over 2TB/mo (used to be more), and haven't received any email. Would be nice to know what this limit is so we're ready when the time comes

I'd love to know what site that was (jgc @ cloudflare . com) so that I can understand why we couldn't offer you a good deal. Also, we don't force people to pay. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17639316

This is not correct. While we’ll reach out heavy users to see if they’d like to upgrade to get all the benefits of our Enterprise accounts, if you don’t want to upgrade you can continue to use our base plans. If you ever hear otherwise from a person on our Sales team, please let me know directly because they are wrong and in violation of our explicit policies. My email: matthewatcloudflaredotcom.

This story plays out on HN like clockwork

1) Person A recommends CloudFlare as a CDN because it's really cheap

2) Person B warns that the were using CF in this manner and had their account closed

3) CF rep comes in to clarify that no such policy exists

That's the reason they are not listed :) They don't have a clear pricing like the other CDNs. They have internal limits and overages for bandwidth but its not public.

That's not true. We do not have overages. We don't charge for bandwidth. If you use a lot of bandwidth then we may contact you and see if paying for service makes more sense for you (for example, if you are running a business on our free plan then the level of support you get might not be what you need; or there may be missing features that would help you).

A close friend of mine also got multiple emails from sales telling that he is using too much bandwidth on the Pro plan and asking to upgrade to $2000/month+ or "else". But they were not able to define what would happen otherwise. Now I guess its just a scare tactic?

I'd like to see those emails. Can you get them and forward them to me? There should not be any "else" in those mails.

Are you sure on the "we do not have overages"? Could I have 100TB of monthly traffic all served by your edge nodes (force cache everything + long expiry + files split into chunks) of legal content (firmware files for embedded devices) and not get kicked off?

Yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com