[furyofantares]

I read the terms before signing up with cloudflare for any of my sites, and it was quite clear it's not meant to be used as an image proxy

> 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content

> The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services.

[kayodelycaon]

Iirc, Cloudflare offers image caching through their CDN service.

So it’s not like they don’t allow it at all. You just need to pay for it.

[judge2020]

Yes, jumping up to the Business tier is usually enough to ensure you won't get suspended[0].

The point of Cloudflare is that hosting your website for free is a service, and you "pay" for that service in strengthening their network; from their S-1[1]:

> Free customers are an important part of our business. .. Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees.... In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses.

Your theoretical cost as a free customer is outweighed by the positive effects of protecting over 10% of websites on the internet, largely for free. Now, if you run a free video site proxying all your multimedia stream segments to serve pirated movies, or create a site dedicated to user image uploads and quickly balloon to serving hundreds of terabytes a day at the expense of Cloudflare, your value to the network is trumped by how much you're actively costing them in uplink costs and risk exposure.

0: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwi... (they were suspended for proxying over 140TB of a bunch of archive files/binary files over the course of 15 days)

1: https://gist.github.com/judge2020/e49138d588950167b736c630aa...

[Arnavion]

TFA explicitly says they're on the Pro plan, ie they're not a free customer. And good job spamming the same incorrect comment in the thread multiple times.

[judge2020]

I address that - $200/mo is a lot more than the $20/mo a pro plan costs, which is why upgrading to Business might've been enough, depending on the traffic levels of the service in question. But if your service is pushing terabytes of images or billions of requests, you're costing CF a lot more than they're getting back (in both money and a stronger network presence). Pretty much every booru gets away with paying $200/mo to Cloudflare for pushing likely 20TB/day minimum with a lot of it cached (thus saving them on bandwidth costs to their main image hosting provider).

[tmikaeld]

Also, using r2 to host the images and a worker to proxy them, is allowed, with unlimited traffic and requests.

[joshspankit]

Can you elaborate or point to a guide with more detail?

[joshspankit]

I’ve seen this exact poor customer experience dozens of times and I shake my head each time.

If there’s a tier to pay for that removes the restriction, then every agent who supports that product should know about it and guide users on why and how to upgrade.

[qwertyforce]

Is js considered as non-html?

[furyofantares]

The gist is (to me) clearly that you're not meant to be effectively reselling cloudflare's own service. It's being sold (or given freely) under the assumption that it's largely used to build something else, not to build another CDN.

EDIT: There's questions downthread if I've misunderstood ImageBoss's role here. I think ImageBoss was also blocked by CloudFlare recently and separately and is not OP's website.

OP's website (imageboss) looks pretty rad, you can host images and have all sorts of derivative transformations that are done by imageboss and cached for you.

But it's functioning as a CDN (and boasts unlimited transformations, requests and bandwidth, which I think we all know is not actually possible.)

[kkielhofner]

I think you misunderstood the involvement of imageboss. From the post:

"We use Imageboss for all our image manipulation needs. During our migration out of cloudflare we had some difficulties with their service... small businesses like Imageboss were humane, professional and could really help us when we were in need"

OP didn't built imageboss or have any relationship with it until they were booted from Cloudflare and moved to it. They certainly didn't build it on top of Cloudflare.

[furyofantares]

Thanks for the correction. Looks like ImageBoss was also (separately) blocked which was confusing me.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/igorescobar_cloudflare-just-b...

[kkielhofner]

No worries! After reading your comment I briefly questioned my understanding of the situation and had to re-read the post again to confirm it.

The post leans pretty heavily comes across as a reactionary rant - it could be much clearer on the entire situation.

[rosywoozlechan]

Right, a SPA is like 1% HTML and rest JS and CSS and some images. Maybe that's what they mean by "or other functional equivalents"

[qwertyforce]

> Maybe that's what they mean by "or other functional equivalents"

Yeah, but I think that js can be considered as a "functional equivalent" to HTML only when Browser APIs are used