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by loxias 1730 days ago
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.
1 comments
OJFord 1730 days ago
'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.

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loxias 1730 days ago
"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 :/

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tomnipotent 1730 days ago
> 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).

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danielheath 1730 days ago
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.
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OJFord 1729 days ago
> 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.

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OJFord 1729 days ago
'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...

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