Now that CloudFront has greatly improved its performance, what's the pitch for using CloudFlare over it?
But I guess nobody's really pushing traffic so nobody cares about $/GB.
Their pricing's insane in a world where you can get prices not too far from that wholesale rate for CDN service (which is a whole different beast from having one or two colo'd servers).
And anyway, nobody pushing serious bits is paying public rates, anywhere. Those discounts can be huge. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason cloud providers have such high rates is so they can give their counterparts an easy, very impressive-looking "win" in negotiations.
This applies to all "enterprise software" too, btw. We've had quotes from vendors that started at 50% off list price, and then negotiated down further from there. It's pretty ridiculous.
They used to: CloudFlare becomes Cloudflare (2016), https://archive.is/v1C1H
- You can't serve all kinds of traffic with Cloudflare self-serve plans. Including some of the ones that tend to use the most bandwidth.
- According to the CloudFlare self-serve plan TOS, IIRC, if you start being a too-heavy user on the those plans CloudFlare can (and, I've heard, will) tell you to upgrade to an enterprise plan. Last I checked (this part's personal experience) they're not super interested in serving enterprise customers very far under a minimum $5k/month level, so there's a huge gap there in which other services are a much, much better value.
(The article discusses Argo smart routing, but in my experience Argo tiered caching has lead to the same kind of performance gains this article talks about).
What Kiwifarms or The Daily Stormer hosted was sufficiently odious (in my view at least), it is disingenuous to suggest that the content is at the same level as what Amazon took action against.
For Parler, the Jan 6 Committee would have inundated Amazon with subpoenas for internal documents and demanded testimony from executives. It's understandable why Parler was deplatformed so many times: because nobody likes government scrutiny. The risk is clearly greater than the reward.
I'm not saying that this was the right decision for society, but I understand where they're coming from, and these companies should be transparent about their motivations.