Cloudflare's free tier specifically excludes video. See https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...:
Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business) Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.
The R2 overview page explicitly lists "Storage for podcast episodes", but a podcast host under the free tier would serve a disproportionate percentage of audio files.
I assume they don't want to become a file sharing website, but hosting a podcast is relatively easy on the bandwidth requirements.
A lot of people who had large image collections (like myself) online struggled with revenue relative to cost circa 2012, I saw a lot of sites I respected go down, though we did see some new style social sites such as Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. Somehow YouTube was doing much better in terms of revenue/cost with video.
Compressing images for the web is not at all trivial, I over-compressed a few million images and really regretted it. When I post to social now I use Photoshop's "(Legacy) Save for web" which has a nice slider for the quality level and find I can get images I take with my Sony to look like they came from a pro camera between 80kb (small flower, blurry background) to 800kb. I see huge splash images on blogs that are smaller, they make a good first impression, look close and the blocking is awful.
It's these petty restrictions that make these pricing policies convenient, and it hurts the market :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://pricecontrol.biz/en/dumping-from-a-to-z/
If they had a limit of 50MB average per page navigation, would you call that rule consistent? It would have largely the same effect and I don't think it would affect the ease of dumping.
If I was paying a flat rate for a no limit plan, that company tried to sell me an Enterprise plan which I declined, then they cut me off, we'd be in court as soon as the clerk would schedule it.
Cloudflare doesn't want their IP's (rotating) to be affected so advised bring your own IP, which is an Enterprise feature.
I've used their free -> enterprise services in multiple companies and clients. Haven't had a single bad experience with them yet. Always helpful, if a bit delayed at times.
IMO the biggest problems are how Cloudflare kept inventing excuses like "issues with account settings" to get the customer on the phone with their sales team, and the mixing of "trust and safety" with sales (like deleting their account for ToS violations after the CEO mentioned talking to a competing CDN).
All i'm saying is we can't make a determination of right and wrong without more data. All things considered, it reads more to me that the data withheld is on the original OP side rather than the CF side.
Either way, it's a unique one off. Most of the mentions in this thread of this behavior all rely on this one experience. I think that in of itself is probably a positive on the side of cloudflare. If it were institutional that they treat clients like this we would hear it regularly.
iGaming is a euphemism for online gambling.
https://assets.ctfassets.net/slt3lc6tev37/4SyI8LW6SeJAGPWwZY...
The customer ( a casino) was using dubious actions in different countries which impacted Cloudflare's IP trust. Tldr: Cloudflare didn't want an IP ban in their IP's due to government regulation.
The fix was to bring their own IP which is an Enterprise feature, as they weren't allowed to use Cloudflare's IPs anymore.
Cloudflare's enterprise customer acquisition strategy seems to be offering free or extremely cheap flat-rate plans with "no limits", then when a customer gets a sizeable amount of traffic they will try to sell them an enterprise plan and cut them off if they don't buy (see https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...). IMO this is pretty shrewd, as it means that companies can't do real price comparisons between Cloudflare and other CDNs until they already have all their infrastructure plugged into Cloudflare.