I am talking internally with the customer support team about what happened to this customer's traffic. It is definitively not the case that doing "four requests per minute" gets you rate limited.
I'm a free plan user because my application is not monetized and obviously would switch to paid plan once it starts generating money. CF free plan has been indispensable for many such free projects.
UptimeRobot(Free) doesn't show anything fishy, except for CF error 521 occasionally. Again UptimeRobot requires paid version to check for HTTP status message, guess I'll have to do it or setup a self hosted(recommendations?) solution to monitor HTTP status of CF Free application.
If CF does perform rate limiting for such low rpm, I would prefer to be intimated as even third rate shared hosting providers do it and I hope CF wouldn't put their reputation on the line for something like this.
If the problem is on cloudflare's side then the cloudflare user doesn't even know about it if it's an intermittent error.
I’m working on such an app, and am hoping to use Cloudflare + Backblaze B2, because of the bandwidth alliance. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/
However, the Terms of Service say:
> 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content
> The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/terms/
And I am wondering what kind of subscription would be appropriate for my use-case if any, that would allow me to host the files on Backblaze B2, and serve these files through Cloudflare.
(Cloudflare would also be hosting our API, so it’s not just video files that we want to serve via Cloudflare.)
However, for a CDN for video content YMMV. Perhaps you should try contacting them directly to have a written estimate.
You'll have to get an Enterprise account for that (it's no longer starting at $5K/mo, you can get custom accounts setup to match your needs).
Meaning that it might be possible to get what we need at a suitable price? $5K/mo is way over our budget until we have actual users and revenue.
If so then that is great. Thanks for the tip :)
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/cloudflare-workers-live-v...
But can we at least get an update if this is the intended behaviour of the CF free plan accounts (so people know to upgrade) or is it an one-off incident?
you can (and should) put monitors on the outside of your infrastructure as well as inside. I've multiples hitting the login page and robots file where I work, and never got an unaccounted 503
one has to start somewhere reasonable and realistic first.
TLDR; He's retracted his claims