Matthew Prince on why Cloudflare offers a free version and always will

rtrgrd

Could we add (2016) to be title?

Onavo

Most people have forgotten just how cheap bandwidth is. Too much AWS lead cloud pricing propaganda brain rot. Without the high prices, your big clouds won't be able to afford 6-7 figs of engineering salary. If you have questions about bandwidth pricing, just go to lookup the video piracy streaming sites that's almost completely powered by ads. They are not YouTube scale and most barely last a year before they have to come back with a new domain (because of deplatforming, not because they ran out of money). A terabyte of bandwidth is maybe worth a dollar at scale (amortized globally, some places are more expensive than others i.e. Africa, certain parts of Asia). Yet the managed clouds gouge customers like there's no tomorrow.

EGreg

It isn’t just free. It’s effectively anonymous. Most hosting (eg AWS) requires you to say who you are, provide a lot of ID. I think some don’t at first (eg Azure, Hetzner) but eventually you need to pay via a credit card, include your actual name etc. With Cloudflare, you literally only need an email address. It continues to be free. The second best is Hostinger, where you can pay with crypto. Github pages is great too, but you don’t really get all the power to customize your own website.

theanonymousone

> In 2015, our employment acceptance rate was 1.6% ... What does that mean? That 1.6% of their offers were accepted by candidates? If some doesn't seem very high...

asadm

Cloudflare is exclusively what I use for any infra work I do (and I do a lot for various projects and startups of my own/others I advice). If something doesn’t fit cloudflare primitives, I try to rethink my design before reaching for gcloud etc. They even do docker containers now which is great but durable objects and workers are game changer for me. The easy nextjs deployment is also my go-to now that vercel isn’t my preferred vendor.