But I used to play with the "free" and "unlimited" players - and it's almost always the same.
The network quality is crap.
The network cannot sustain bandwidth during periods you need it.
There are hidden TOS stuff (sometimes made up) that they grab you with if you start using "too much" of the "unlimited" free service.
They are losing money so cannot sustain the pricing.
Pricing is opaque or not aligned with underlying costs.
Or they just flat out will not disclose their "80x cheaper" pricing because it's a total lie that it's 80x cheaper.
In short, I'm tired of that as I've gotten older.
Let's take cloudflare. If I egress 1PB of 8K video 100% into India per day, my guess is their per minute "upfront" stream pricing generates a call from some sales dude. Oh, you violated xx/yy/zz, we can't support that etc. Ugh. Same with their CDN stuff. If I start doing 100% egress into South Africa - wham - some weird call. I don't even have to look anymore to know how this goes.
If I strung together all their bandwidth alliance folks and started moving AWS Snowmobile data around per week (100PB per week, distributing it using the bandwidth alliance backbone for "free", without using other significant paid services) you get the call.
I ask simply, where is their 80x cheaper CDN pricing? OH, asking for pricing, you must work for AWS. It's pathetic really - that's the response? Point me to the webpage for this.
Before any discounts for committed use (normally 12 months or more) AWS Cloudfront goes down to $0.02/GB. The supposed 80x cheaper Cloudflare price is then in the $0.0002/GB range. IF you actually believed they had their costs low enough to offer this, they would clean up. Instead it is almost certainly a lie - but I'm happy to be proven wrong. If you do have needs this cheap, you might look at building your own CDN (see Netflix and friends).
The real irony is they do blog posts using AWS pricing, but don't release their own. I use cloudflare, I think they are great as a hobby level user of their stuff. But stuff for work goes to GCP (in past) and more recently AWS and Azure (which has a big in these days with office 365 / directory / remote desktop stuff into bigger players despite what may be underlying tech weaknesses).
> one of the top cloud providers, if not the top
rather than:
> one of the top, if not the top, cloud providers
since the latter cashes out to:
> one of the top cloud providers, if not the top cloud providers
(Sorry. I know it’s annoying … but it’s my life’s mission to eradicate this particular construct.)
AWS is probably ~20% above others from sources I know that work on AWS and Azure billing teams.