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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

The big question I have regarding R2 (for those no in the lops: Cloudflare's alternative to S3 with no egress fees (!)) is if the terms hold if you choose to use it to host video. If yes, then wow, this truly is disruptive.

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I honestly think it'll get flooded with bad actors and they'll be forced to set limits (e.g. download rate limits, which probably wouldn't be in their best interest since it'd occupy a connection for longer).

Cf has really mature trust and safety as well as security teams and tools. I've no doubt they've taken bad actors into account considering all of the other offerings they have that have also attracted bad actors.

No question. They've been dealing with that factor at hyper scale for many years now. The only question is how they've already decided to go about it.

They'll certainly want to make a big splash with the product, given the cloud giants they're taking on. That's better done with fewer limitations initially, even if they know ahead of time the various ways they'll restrict abuse over time.

Yeah, 8chan definitely weren't bad actors and Cloudflare definitely didn't have to make a PR statement about booting them from their services.

That's a good question, I wonder how that will play along with their Video Streaming service. I guess this wouldn't be hosted streaming, but a downloadable video file, so they'd have different use cases.

streaming is usually just a lot of little 2s video files.

>I wonder how that will play along with their Video Streaming service

Yeah, that's my main concern, are they really going to disrupt even themselves?

>wouldn't be hosted streaming, but a downloadable video file

I agree but then if one can just add a <video src=""> and forget about it (plus, it's free) then streaming wouldn't even be considered (for plenty of use cases).

There is another possible pricing loophole: They could price the amount of data loaded from R2, regardless if it's for internal use or egress (similar to S3 infrequent access, but cheaper). If they go that route, they'd probably make it per-request for small request, and by-size for big requests.

> if the terms hold if you choose to use it to host video

Pretty damn disingenuous if the terms don't hold based on type of content. There's no such caveat mentioned.

You're already gonna be encouraged to move to an Enterprise ($5k+) account if you use too many resources, and/or if too much of your traffic is from non-browser clients, and probably for a bunch of other reasons I don't know about it. The terms under which this may happen are essentially arcane knowledge learned through experience. Think about it: if this weren't the case, every other CDN would already be out of business, rather than rapidly expanding and acquiring and growing.

Plus, you don't get an SLA for any of their "self-serve" plans until the $200/month one.

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