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by MichaelGG 4007 days ago
Yes I say "host" as a shorthand for "cache so I don't have to serve much".

Just saying that when I contacted them, they were clear that we shouldn't use them for images or media, and their general ToS agrees.

Their enterprise pricing starts cheap so if they throw in "unlimited bandwidth for everything" then it'd be quite a good deal.

1 comments

There must have been some misunderstanding/miscommunication, if not then Cloudflare has pivoted their business significantly from what my understanding of it was (granted I haven't researched them in over a year).

Media is the primary purpose for CDNs. The performance boost comes from a global network caching the media files so when requests are made for the resources, the end user downloads the media from the nearest CDN node instead of your server that is potentially on the other side of the world. It doesn't matter quite so much to have non-media (such as the page html) served locally because the size of an html page is generally significantly smaller than the media embedded in the page.

From the small amount of research I've done on the Cloudflare service just now, it doesn't seem very transparent how exactly it works. I've found information on 4chan and imgur using them to serve billions of CDN requests, but others saying don't rely on their CDN. So who knows, maybe it's on a case by case basis.

https://www.cloudflare.com/terms Section 10:

...Additionally, the purpose of CloudFlare's Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited...