Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

[thr0waway939]

We are a reasonably medium sized company, with very tight IT budget. We were previously on GCP, CF sales team saw us use the free version and were happy to onboard us to their business plan ($200/mo). Now, after a year and half roughly, CF wants to move us to the Enterprise plan, claiming we are consuming a lot more bandwidth than what is "allowed" for the business plan and that they won't be able to provide us good uptime % at this rate.

A lot of this stuff wasn't communicated when we signed up for the business plan. There was no mention of limits, nor any contracts nor fineprint. The business plan was pitched to us as if it was the only plan we would ever need. And now, CF wants us to pay $3000-4000 a month which we clearly don't have budget for. I checked their fineprint, it says nothing about any limitations whatsoever. If you go to their pricing page, https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/business/ even that doesn't talk about anything of this sort.

I'm not saying CF is bad, but, their sales tactics are shady and there was a lot of integration done on our backends to migrate from GCP to CF. This really has left a sour taste in my mouth. If they had just been upfront, I could have saved all this pain and money.

Do you know of any alternatives to CF? If I can convince my top execs to afford $3000 a month, I want to make sure it's on something else and not on CloudFlare. Pretty sure this $3000 a month will be increased to additional for some other excuse later as I don't trust them anymore. I was thinking of Google Cloud CDN, but it doesn't look cheap. We do about 200-300TB a month as per CF reports.

Any suggestions are much appreciated.

[jgrahamc]

Hey, I'm Cloudflare's CTO. This doesn't sound right to me. Please forward the correspondence you've had with us to jgc@cloudflare.com and I will look into this internally.

[asperous]

Are you serving files other then html/images/css, etc? 300tb is a lot, AWS cloudfront would be charging ~$6000/month by a quick estimate.

Recognize they were probably taking a loss with your business, I'm surprised you didn't discuss how much bandwidth you were expecting when you agreed to the contract, sounds like a miscommunication.

[dismantlethesun → asperous]

Cloud front is also pretty expensive bandwidth wise. CDNs has a pretty wide range of quality, features and pricing.

I would put Cloudflare in the lower tier of quality but they do have a lot of features. If the OP only cares about raw bandwidth pricing, then they could probably find a CDN with no features except file serving and reporting for about $1500.

They’d have to compromise a little on Time to first byte but there’s a lot of applications where that matters less like video serving.

[steve_adams_86]

$200/month is mind-bogglingly cheap for 200-300TB per month.

What are you doing with that much data that it doesn't generate enough value to be worth a few thousand per month?

Maybe CF could have given you a heads up sooner and communicated more clearly from the start. Part of the issue might be that they're making the assumption that their customers (generally more tech savvy) are aware of the value of bandwidth at that volume.

[choffee]

I would say that if you are doing 200TB/month then $200/m was too good to be true. Sounds like you have just outgrown your current plan. Have you costed that up on other providers? I assume you where not doing that sort of bandwidth on GCP. It's a different billing model than most clould providers. If you had stuck with GCP the costs would have grown in line with your bandwidth so you would probably be paying the $3000 by now with them. CF could probably do a better job with defining what the products are though.

[mike668]

As other people have stated, you will have trouble finding other CDNs that will be as cheap as CF. That being said, you can always try to do it yourself with a couple of dedicated machines and install varnish on them.

But I have to ask, if you're doing 300TB a month how are you not able to afford $3000 for CF?

[corobo]

Honestly I’m relieved I’d need to get into the hundred+ TB area before I get the sales call. I’d have expected it to be a much lower number.

How are you chucking that much data while still being concerned about cheap? I can’t really suggest anything useful technologically without knowing what the data is

Don’t knee jerk change supplier because you’re annoyed haha, you’re unlikely to get cheaper and kinda likely to get less reliable - that’s on you to justify later to the person asking why your 300TB/mo pipeline broke, not something I’d want to explain without having thought through the initial reaction properly!

At least discuss it with someone first, who knows maybe 3 grand a month isn’t that big an expense considering it’s probably something the company needs to operate. Having a “top level” executive layer implies much more budget elsewhere, it can’t be that big an expense. Maybe they can get rid of a lower level exec to pay for it. Or maybe you don’t need all of the outgoing data. Can’t really guess anything without knowing the situation better

Operating in an annoyed bubble is almost guaranteed to be way more stress down the road though in any case, get a fresh mind on it

[Kaotique → corobo]

Pay peanuts, expect the world. Complain on HN about with a throwaway account. Get a personal message from the Cloudflare CEO.

How can some entity move 200-300TB but have no finances to pay for it while having a multi layer management team? I really don't understand any of it.

[jgrahamc → Kaotique]

Pretty sure I'm still CTO, unless eastdakota has news for me in our next one-to-one.

[Kaotique → jgrahamc]

Haha, my bad.

[putlake]

I use both Cloudflare and Fastly. Haven't done a deep comparison of their pricing, but Fastly at my teeny scale (<$100 per month) is affordable for the benefit they provide.

Is CDN bandwidth your only need or do you also need features like log streaming to BigQuery, WAF, direct integration with Google via signed exchanges (SXGs)?

[codefreakxff]

300TB is a lot. No idea what your business is. But that is a lot of data for a medium sized business.

I remember an article here about someone optimizing their cloudflare setup with something else and sending tons of data through some peering agreement. Its 2am and I don’t remember the details. Anyone else remember seeing that?

[corobo → codefreakxff]

This feels familiar - was it image hosting? Using Backblaze b2 for storage and Cloudflare workers to chuck data around

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

[stanac → codefreakxff]

Maybe Tory Hunt and his bandwidth post[0]

[0] https://www.troyhunt.com/how-i-got-pwned-by-my-cloud-costs/

[getcrunk]

That's 1-2 cents a gb. Good luck finding less than that price anywhere.

Bunny cdn is around 1-2 cents

[mythz]

> I'm not saying CF is bad, but, their sales tactics are shady

Sounds like your company had unreasonable expectations, their business plan [1] doesn't mention anywhere they provide unlimited bandwidth, what they do say is who their Business plan is for, which should've set expectations:

> For small ecommerce websites and businesses requiring advanced security and performance, PCI compliance, and prioritized email support.

i.e. it's unreasonable to assume 200-300TB /month can be classified as a small ecommerce website and that your company should've been more diligent in verifying what the expected cost should be for their high bandwidth requirements than just assuming cloud hosting companies should bear the loss of their excessive resource usage in a fixed rate plan.

But I do think Cloudflare should clarify the free bandwidth their plans include to better clarify the suitability of their plans.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/business/

[sixhobbits]

I have my issues with Cloudflare and their captcha and their contribution to the centralisation of the internet, but this doesn't really seem justified. You clearly aren't using their business plan for its intended use - and yes, marketing and sales teams are always going to emphasise features over limits, but I'm guessing a quick "hey we plan to use this for 300TB/month is that OK?" question up front would have saved a lot of effort on both sides.

Overall, I'm always really impressed by how the Cloudflare exec team is on here, helping out directly or offering to get involved personally when HN has a problem. I think if people keep abusing it like this, that level of support will probably be dialled back significantly, which would be a shame.

[jgrahamc → sixhobbits]

Overall, I'm always really impressed by how the Cloudflare exec team is on here, helping out directly or offering to get involved personally when HN has a problem.

There's something to learn from every customer interaction. Big or small. Free or paying. I like to hear from customers.

[time4tea]

Perhaps a few comments are missing what seems to me to be the main point... its not about whether the product is cheap vs the competition.

It's about the sales process... if the client was open about bandwidth estimates and has broadly met them, then its still not great to offer a teaser rate and pull the rug later, once the integration is done. This would negatively impact the client, and isn't a way of doing business that great companies promote.

JGC said he'd take a look and that seems like a good response from CF.

[homero]

You expect 300tb for less than 3k? Even that's a steal. Try calling Akamai and it'll be 10s more. Even Keycdn is going to cost you 7k. Sounds like you're serving video and expecting it to be free and complaining you're getting a steal at Cloudflare.

[cxcorp]

I love their products, but their sales hasn't really convinced me either. I contacted them while our web service was getting hammered by a TCP SYN flood. They asked me which layer the attack was on, and I told them L4. They proceeded to try to sell me some TCP proxy product of theirs for $$$$, and despite my protests, just wouldn't listen when I told them that their HTTPS proxying/load balancer/CDN/whatever product would probably be enough.

I left that call and activated that free tier product and it has been enough. No wonder their sales reps need to resort to such tactics when their $0/$20/$200 product is enough.

[Dracophoenix]

BunnyCDN, Beluga, and KeyCDN seem to have pretty decent pricing.

If you want another free CDN, you could consider DDOS-Guard albeit with some caution.

If you can list a budget, type of content, and/or required features, I can provide a better recommendation.

In the meantime, you can sift through the following websites:

https://www.cdnperf.com/

https://cdncomparison.com/

https://www.cdnplanet.com

[Ameo → Dracophoenix]

I use bunny.net for my personal websites. I'm largely quite happy with it; it's definitely a great budget option and is very easy to set up.

That being said, it's definitely a budget option. Their admin dashboard, features, PoP count, advanced functionality, etc. is certainly a cut below that of Cloudflare. No HTTP3 support, no brotli compression, stuff like that as well.

Also, they had a configuration issue last night where the certificate for all of y sites was expired for ~3 hours. They fixed it and to be clear it's never happened before, but yeah that kind of thing is probably not going to happen with Cloudflare.

[getcrunk → Ameo]

Idk about cf, but amazon,aws,Microsoft,google all have outages. Outages happen.

[onimsha]

To choose a CDN, will need to know following inputs: * What kind of delivery you're using ? Images ? Videos ? Streaming ?

* Where is your major traffic coming from ? US ? Asia ? Africa ?

* What kind of integration you're using on CF ? Is there any special features on CF that you're using ?

Alternatives, i could say alot: CDN77, BunnyCDN, Fastly etc... But it's really depends on your current setup.

[1123581321]

Hard to say you were mistreated without knowing how exactly your sales conversations went, and what you're doing with your application, but I agree this must be dismaying. Still, I would rather you pay a fair (but below market) rate for your bandwidth to keep Cloudflare free or reasonably priced for my smaller services. This has me wanting to keep using them.

[PixelPaul]

BunnyCDN

[getcrunk → PixelPaul]

Do you use them in prod. The price is alluring. Thinking of putting my next large project on there.

[tmikaeld → getcrunk]

Compared to Cloudflare, they're slow unless you use their premium providers. But that just makes sense, cheap peering and storage = low prices.

[ing33k → getcrunk]

I have.. they are OK. just stick with the Pull Zones.