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Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

> Cloudflare was the least helpful service I could have imagined given the circumstances. A long term user and on and off customer thinks they were attacked for two days and you don’t lift a finger?

> File this under, “Things I should’ve known but didn’t.” Did you know that “The maximum file size Cloudflare’s CDN caches is 512MB for Free, Pro, and Business customers and 5GB for Enterprise customers.” That’s right, Cloudflare saw requests for a 13.7 GB file and sent them straight to origin every time BY DESIGN.

I don't really see how Cloudflare has much blame here. He's an "on and off customer" which I'm guessing means currently "off". They only cache a limited number of file extensions (qcow2 isn't one of them), and it's all documented.

AWS always seems pretty generous in resolving these cases at least.

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I would not be surprised if AWS actually allocates marketing dollars towards covering bills like this.

In the long term this is a brilliant plan because it helps prevent people from blacklisting the provider.

Imagine someone gets hit with $3k bill on their personal, feels wronged, goes to work and makes effort at their employer to move off AWS.

I don't know about most HN readers but I'd probably fall in this category and past places I've done work for were +$100k/month corporate bills with AWS.

My thoughts exactly - if I felt they burned me over $2k on my personal account they'd quickly lose a couple orders of magnitude more than that on corporate.

It also doesn't cost AWS anywhere near $3k to actually move that data. Data transfer charges have to be a massive profit center for them.

Given VPS providers give you terabytes of bandwidth included even with cheap VPS', I'd say that a $3k bandwidth bill from AWS costs AWS pretty close to $0

It's all about how much bps it was at peak. That drives scaling infrastructure which is real money also p95 billing).

Sadly the world has gone in a diff direction when it comes to billing people. The rationale? Util based billing and p95 is too complicated.

You don't pay less if you utilize the existing infrastructure more efficiently. There is no spot market for bandwidth.

Heroku really screwed me over once and the reps I spoke with were complete and total assholes and acted like I was in the wrong when it was their system that totally dropped the ball. I now advocate against them at my workplaces and I know it's cost them at minimum tens of thousands of dollars, though I get that isn't much money for them.

> Heroku really screwed me over once

How?

There was a fraudulent and malicious DMCA claim against one of my sites. Heroku without any notice took down ALL of my sites, one of which was a part of my livelihood. They claimed they emailed me with 24 hour notice but that absolutely did not happen. I had to pound on their door to make them reverse it, they victim blamed me the entire time and had a super snarky and shitty attitude, told me I should have been more proactive about the notice I never got.

I cannot in good faith ever recommend a service that would take down a website with zero notice and be so uncooperative in fixing what was ultimately their fault. It cost me money for that site to be down and I had to cancel my entire day to deal with them, and if the stakes were bigger it could easily wind up costing my employer hundreds of thousands of dollars.

> I don't know about most HN readers but I'd probably fall in this category and past places I've done work for were +$100k/month corporate bills with AWS.

It's happening in this article too: Cloudflare wasn't in the wrong here, even the bill wasn't from Cloudflare, and the author is already publicly advocating against them. I feel quite uneasy about that.

Wait, Cloudflare doesn't cache files bigger than 5GB even for Enterprise customers with custom plans? Isn't that pretty small for a CDN?

Is it possible to pay them more to increase the limit?

5GB per file.

I mean frontend JS got out of control but I've yet to see bundle.js reach 4.8GB.

That strikes me as small, because CDNs are often used for software downloads and updates. Think Steam, Windows Update, OSX, Xbox Live, PSN, etc, etc. Those files are regularly larger than 5GB.

Obviously those customers have negotiated deals with the CDNs, but if there's a 5GB hard limit it sounds like Cloudflare doesn't want to compete there.

I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted, I don't think my comment was inflammatory.

Cloudflare has always been different than a generic CDN - their tagline is "The Web Performance and Security Company". Most of their features are focused on those things, and they don't really support video streaming / etc..

Cloudflare has supported video streaming for a while now: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/

I agree with you and it's a mental model that Cloudflare isn't a swiss-army knife CDN.. They optimize for fronting web services (And do that very very well).

I use them on my personal site - but on the corporate side where we need TCP acceleration, edge serving of binary resources and POP presence in China - we turn back to crusty ole Akamai.

For giant files, you can at least break the file up into pieces. If nothing else, it's a greater technical challenge to build a caching system that scales to infinite GB. Why would Cloudflare invest in such a system when it's of dubious utility in the first place?

If other CDNs do it and cloudflare doesn't, then it's harder to switch.

You can actually use CF cache api in their 'workers' to accomplish this.

That's the size of one DVD-sized ISO, how much more do you need? Blu-Ray rips?

Skyrim, from 2011, was 11GB.

100% chance skyrim was more than one file on that blue ray.

They said ISO, so that’s one file.

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