Kentonv, how does CloudFlare manage to offer free cdn when google cloud and other providers charge a ton for bandwidth. What are your limits? How are you still making money in the millions of sites that use free CloudFlare cdn ?
Because internet architecture is based around transit capacity, not usage. You buy capacity like 10gbit/sec lines to interconnect with and Cloudflare has enough bandwidth to easily support their free customers and upsell on other features.
Remember they are also a security service with DDOS protection and that requires high bandwidth anyway. Other CDNs don't charge for bandwidth but rather for bytes-used, which is just more profitable, especially if you don't have a lot of other features to charge for.
I'm surprised that more CDNs don't try to compete with CF on this but apparently that's just how they want to operate.
The product and engineering challenges involved in building out our network such that it is both performant and cost-effective to operate are fascinating.
The easiest way to learn the answer to this sort of question is to come work at Cloudflare :)
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Kentonv, how does CloudFlare manage to offer free cdn when google cloud and other providers charge a ton for bandwidth. What are your limits? How are you still making money in the millions of sites that use free CloudFlare cdn ?
Because internet architecture is based around transit capacity, not usage. You buy capacity like 10gbit/sec lines to interconnect with and Cloudflare has enough bandwidth to easily support their free customers and upsell on other features.
Remember they are also a security service with DDOS protection and that requires high bandwidth anyway. Other CDNs don't charge for bandwidth but rather for bytes-used, which is just more profitable, especially if you don't have a lot of other features to charge for.
I'm surprised that more CDNs don't try to compete with CF on this but apparently that's just how they want to operate.
The product and engineering challenges involved in building out our network such that it is both performant and cost-effective to operate are fascinating.
The easiest way to learn the answer to this sort of question is to come work at Cloudflare :)