CDN images

[misty nexus]

I've got a website that is largely images + text - according to the "Content Delivery Network" section of the ToS here https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/service-specific-terms-application-services/

Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files.

So, am I not allowed to use the CDN as a front for an image server?

[fossil surge]

The key phrasing there is "disproportionate percentage". What kind/volume of traffic would you be pushing through that? And how would it be used? If it's for your website, you're almost certainly going to be fine.

[misty nexus]

It's effectively a gallery, but maybe imagine tumblr style text + images. I don't have actual numbers at the moment, but "you're almost certainly going to be fine" doesn't exactly make me want to invest in the engineering time to set up the CDN just to be told to kick rocks

[junior coral]

I believe the language is specifically referring to the potential to abuse the Free tier. Emphasis mine:

if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services [to do the things] in a disproportionate manner

If your website is hosting a gallery, that's fine. But if your website is hosting a gallery and you're getting thousands upon thousands of hits per day, then we might question what's going on.

Basically we don't want you operating a file sharing service on the free tier.

Disclaimer: opinion and interpretation is solely mine. I do not speak against our Terms of Service and any information you might interpret from my interpretation can't be used to create a loophole in the ToS from any standpoint, including legally.

[misty nexus]

Right, I get the disclaimer, can you point me toward where I can get a definitive answer for my use case? Like a compliance department or something?

[junior coral]

I don't believe you need one, because if you were to host your website and its associated gallery, and if Cloudflare were to see something that would constitute as "disproportionate", we would send you emails about it long before se just up and terminate the service.

I personally know a few people who host thousand-photo galleries using a static site generator, hosted through cloudflare, and they've never had an issue. Even when posting the link to 20k+ member discord servers.

I think you're safe.

We're going to work with you either way. No one is just going to up and terminate your site without trying to get a hold of you and seeing what's up first.

but let me see if I can find some documentation on what counts as "disproportionate"

[misty nexus]

I can take all the "we're cool bro" assurances you want to give me but if I put in all the work to pipe things through the CDN and then get told my use case is not allowed, that's a massive waste of money

It's not even that I don't want to pay for cloudflare services, but this "yeah you can use it til we say no" policy is crappy and scary

[junior coral]

Just out of curiosity, what's the use case? How many images are we talking? What kind of galleries? Personal photography or..?

[junior coral]

I completely understand. But I got some info from my teams.

First, this blog post outlines a bit of the changes that were made to the ToS recently.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/

Second, we don't publish any "true limits" on a "you can host x much or y number" basis, because all that would do is give people the means to skirt the limits and claim no foul.

What it boils down to is this; if you're hosting a site full of images, like a photography portfolio, or your own personal AI-generated art gallery, or similar, go for it. If you're hosting hundreds of thousands of images to thousands of people, or if you're allowing anyone with a login to upload and serve out a huge library, we're probably going to want you to look into Cloudflare Images https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-images/ or similar.

Disproportionate is more of a measurement of what you're hosting vs. what the service is for + edge resource load. Free tier with a personal portfolio website isn't ever going to bother us because it's a portfolio site, that's the kind of stuff we want to help you accelerate.

But if you're trying to build the next Imgur... well, now we have to talk about things.

But again, this all applies to Free tier. If you're paying for Pro or Business or Cloudflare Images and/or Stream, your likelihood of being cut off is basically zero. You'd have to be actively crippling a region/colo, and even then we'd email you like "bro cool it."

[misty nexus]

Use case is about 400g of images (including resized versions), maybe 1.3 million? But most are infrequently accessed, if ever.

About 140TB a month in bandwidth, BUT I'm pretty sure the vast majority of that is from our streams, both LLHLS and WebRTC

I think cloudflare images is punitively priced for our use case, but I have no stats on our image use, so I'm not sure about that. It's one of the to do items

I appreciate you looking into the limits, and totally understand not wanting to publish hard and fast limits for things, I know how users are

[junior coral]

yeah if you have 400 gigs of images and they're only accessed rarely, then the occasional pull + cache from your origin won't ring any bells.

as for the streaming media, i'm not up to speed on Stream yet, but it might be good to look into that service. Especially if you have multiple viewers at a time.

[misty nexus]

We have usually 60 streams going at once, with anywhere from 0-60 viewers each, at least during peak hours. Not huge, but from what I saw, punishingly expensive going through cloudflare stream

We pay ~400 for colo right now, which runs everything. Self managed, of course, but the savings are worth it. We'd love to CDN our stream files otherwise, but I don't think that would be kosher

not to mention it's missing features we'd use and formats we use

Workers and pages seem promising though for our frontend/backend, though that bears more experimentation for sure

[junior coral]

Not sure about Workers personally but Pages is slick because you can just push a change to a git repo and Pages will sync it and rebuild almost immediately.

[misty nexus]

Yeah we need to dig into that more. It's tough right now with few analytics about page hits/requests/etc that I can directly plug in to the pricing calcs. We'll see after seeing how the cdn goes

[junior coral]

Understandable. Definitely give things a test and see how it goes. I don't float around the help channels in here 100% of the time but you're welcome to @ me if you have any specific questions, or anything that might be "too high up" for the Community champs.

[misty nexus]

Thanks I really do appreciate it. One question I have now is, is there any way to get longer execution times on workers? I am unsure if some of our calls can fit in 50ms.

I suppose it's also worth asking, is that cpu time, or also the time it takes for network requests?

[junior coral]

for Workers there's an Unbound usage model that allows for up to 30 second requests

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#worker-limits

[cursive juniper]

Execution time is unlimited, only CPU time is limited. A fetch request uses 0ms of CPU time