Re:Image hoster pushes 1.8 PB per month through Cloudflare CDN
by idp on Monday October 31, 2016 @03:50AM
(#12834895)
Apologies, that was a poor choice of wording on my part. While I do entertain the theoretical possibility that CF silently uses low-tier customer data in interesting ways (such as data mining and tracking user behavior), my actual expectations of the way CF actually uses this data exactly matches your description (DDoS mitigation & things like that).
This makes it sound like we are doing some monetization of low-tier customer data. We are not doing that with any data (low-tier or anything else). That would be hella creepy.
We do track abuse (DDoS attacks, etc.) whoever they hit and use that information to protect other customers. So, in that sense low-tier customers help our overall business, but it's a common lie from our competitors that we are somehow monetizing traffic. Cloudflare's business is pretty simple: work out how to operate our services as cheaply as possible, charge web site/application owners more than that amount.