[jauer]

(approximately) Cloudflare provides a proxy service that you'd use to access your B2 data from home or other cloud without paying for egress.

They can do this because it costs almost nothing to move data between B2 and Cloudflare, and then from Cloudflare to almost anywhere. Moving data from B2 to most other places on the internet likely costs them more because Backblaze isn't in a position to negotiate adventagous peering agreements with ISPs.

[dan15]

Note that you can't use a free Cloudflare account just for things like images, video and other binary files, as they'll suspend the account. It must be used primarily for a website, not content hosting. If you only want to use Cloudflare for files, you need a paid account.

[chx]

Nope, eastdakota confirmed it's fine as a b2 image proxy right here on HN.

[mkl]

Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857

[mwambua]

Looking at his response, it seems like that's only true if you use workers... which you will end up paying for.

[chx]

Five dollars a month, fixed, yes. fortepan.hu does this, it's a few terabytes of Hungarian historic photos. The site couldn't exist as it does now without Cloudflare essentially donating the bandwidth.

[mwambua]

In addition, you need to use Cloudflare web workers if you want any sort of access controls. (I think this is part of why it makes financial sense for Cloudflare to do this)

[loxias]

Wow! Cool! Very surprised that Cloudflare wouldn't charge an arm and a leg for such a service... considering they're moving the actual bits.

I'm poking around at the Cloudflare website, what's the name of the aforementioned service? What term should I google?

I'm ignorant of "modern Cloudflare" -- other than reading their fantastic technical blog, I've never used them in a professional capacity and don't know their product offering -- other than a cache, CDN, DDOS protection, and a Lambda.

[OJFord]

'bandwidth alliance'

As far as I recall it's not a service or even any setting you have to set up, just a sort of policy.

[loxias]

"Bandwidth Alliance" seems to be some sort of B2B consortium.

I'll dig into this more later, but unless I'm missing something obvious (I very well might be...) there's not a easy/inexpensive method for me to sign up and join the "bandwidth alliance", so that data transfer from B2 to my laptop is free.

I have a few VPSs with Linode, which is a member of the "Bandwidth Alliance" but I don't see any details, numbers, prices, specs... Just a bunch of marketing :/

[tomnipotent]

> there's not a easy/inexpensive method for me to sign up and join the "bandwidth alliance"

Not unless you run a data center and intend to peer with other bandwidth providers to join your intranet to the internet. It's intended for large service providers like Cloudflare/Backblaze that do direct bandwidth interconnect at physical locations and don't have to involve other intermediaries (like Level 3) to move data between members.

Otherwise you "join" by hosting services/content with an Alliance member and making sure you only use other services that do the same. Even then, bandwidth isn't always free (Azure and GCP still have some costs, for example, but discounted).

[danielheath]

If you setup a free cloudflare proxy fronting your B2 bucket, then download from that, the egress from B2 is free because it's going to cloudflare and the egress from cloudflare is free because they don't charge for it.

[OJFord]

> there's not a easy/inexpensive method for me to sign up and join the "bandwidth alliance"

As I said, you don't have to. As far as I recall you just use two 'B's in the 'B2B consortium' and it's policy applies to you.

[OJFord]

'its'*, sorry I can't notice that and leave it, even if I've missed the edit window!

To make this comment a bit less useless though, all you have to do is something like this: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using...

Weirdly they don't advertise it there.

More info here:

> the Bandwidth Alliance is a group of forward-thinking cloud and networking companies that are committed to discounting or waiving data transfer fees for shared customers.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/backblaze-b2-and-the-s3-compatib...