Price is the main difference between AWS CloudFront/Fastly and CF. In most cases, CF prices are fixed, like $200 for business or $20 for the pro plan. If you like fixed prices VMs from Linode or DO, chances are high that you will like Cloudflare too. Of course, advanced addons features like CF Argo and CF Bot management cost more money at Cloudflare too.
Using CF as an initialism for Cloudflare when talking about CloudFront and Cloudflare is really confusing -- especially because Cloudflare doesn't capitalize the F but CloudFront does.
- Last I checked, the $20 plan has no SLA whatsoever and the $200 has a pretty poor one. Thought admittedly I don't know whether Cloudfront is better there.
- You can't serve all kinds of traffic with Cloudflare self-serve plans. Including some of the ones that tend to use the most bandwidth.
- According to the CloudFlare self-serve plan TOS, IIRC, if you start being a too-heavy user on the those plans CloudFlare can (and, I've heard, will) tell you to upgrade to an enterprise plan. Last I checked (this part's personal experience) they're not super interested in serving enterprise customers very far under a minimum $5k/month level, so there's a huge gap there in which other services are a much, much better value.
I have a small service for an nfp on the $20 plan and I remember working out cloudfront+aws was would have set them back roughly 1500 per month, and that's without looking into occasional viral traffic spikes. The price disparity is baffling.
I said the opposite ("cloud providers can't keep charging 5-10¢/GB egress") a few years ago, but I guess I was wrong. I still think their pricing is absolutely insane in a world where even the smallest companies can colo a server and get wholesale transit that works out to <$0.005/GB.
But I guess nobody's really pushing traffic so nobody cares about $/GB.
> I still think their pricing is absolutely insane in a world where even the smallest companies can colo a server and get wholesale transit that works out to <$0.005/GB.
Their pricing's insane in a world where you can get prices not too far from that wholesale rate for CDN service (which is a whole different beast from having one or two colo'd servers).
And anyway, nobody pushing serious bits is paying public rates, anywhere. Those discounts can be huge. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason cloud providers have such high rates is so they can give their counterparts an easy, very impressive-looking "win" in negotiations.
Yeah I was going to say much the same. Nobody with a large cloud bill is paying anywhere near list price. It's very hard to compare services apples to apples without actually getting a private quote from each side's sales team unfortunately.
This applies to all "enterprise software" too, btw. We've had quotes from vendors that started at 50% off list price, and then negotiated down further from there. It's pretty ridiculous.
Erm... why not? Everyone knows cloud providers are gouging customers on egress bandwidth fees, it's great that someone bucks the trend and calls them out on it.
Origin shield is quite pricey; Argo tiered caching is free.
(The article discusses Argo smart routing, but in my experience Argo tiered caching has lead to the same kind of performance gains this article talks about).
Except for the fact that hosting Wikileaks and Parler with the content in question was always legally contentious.
What Kiwifarms or The Daily Stormer hosted was sufficiently odious (in my view at least), it is disingenuous to suggest that the content is at the same level as what Amazon took action against.
All of those sites are toxic customers. Continuing to host them will draw the government's ire.
For Parler, the Jan 6 Committee would have inundated Amazon with subpoenas for internal documents and demanded testimony from executives. It's understandable why Parler was deplatformed so many times: because nobody likes government scrutiny. The risk is clearly greater than the reward.
I'm not saying that this was the right decision for society, but I understand where they're coming from, and these companies should be transparent about their motivations.
So why aren't those sites on Amazon right now? Seriously, if Amazon is such an amazing bastion of allowing that disgusting content, why are KiwiFarms and the Daily Stormer not happily up and running on AWS with CloudFront?
