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Comment by EE84M3i | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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

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