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Comment by ffritz | Hacker News Reader

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ffritz·

Does anyone know if Cloudflare is cool with audio files? I know they don’t want you to serve video.

Or any similar fast CDNs allowing for audio files.

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I think they just don't want you to serve large stuff, because their CDN isn't optimized for that.

I serve all kinds of files <10mb via CF, that includes audio, video, images etc.

Files over >10mb I handle myself. Around 100TB is handled by CF each month and around 700TB by my own servers (4 Hetzner dedicated servers).

The whole setup costs me around 300 euros/month paid to Hetzner, and 20 to CF. That means I pay around 40 cents / TB.

So far CF hasn't complained, and I've been using them for years. Though they try to pitch me their higher priced plans now and then.

I've never used Cloudflare, so I got to ask, do they prohibit serving large files or discourage by some quota?

I've only heard stories of people getting terminated over abusing their CDN like that, and I don't fancy being next.

They suspend accounts (after months if not immediately) that abuse serving disproportionate amount of non-HTML content, videos specifically. However there is still ambiguity (or lack of detail) in their terms if you can use their Workers, a paid FaaS, to stream blob data.

I thought this only applies to their free accounts, and that they have no issues with serving any size files as long as you pay them.

> I know they don’t want you to serve video.

They do have an optimized product for that with Cloudflare Streaming.

> I know they don’t want you to serve video.

They do cache small video files, even for free, but I think they don't want you to run a streaming business on top of them (without using their dedicated service).

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