Why does Cloudflare offer unlimited bandwidth for free hosting?
Why does Cloudflare Pages have such a generous Free tier? - mattsayar.com
https://mattsayar.com/why-does-cloudflare-pages-have-such-a-generous-free-tier/
Until a few years ago, most hosting services required a fee, but in recent years, there are several services that offer free plans, including Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages , GitLab Pages , and Netlify . However, Cloudflare's free plan is particularly good, and one of the reasons for this is that it offers unlimited bandwidth.
Each hosting service has various usage limits, but one thing that is of particular concern is the 'free bandwidth.' If the website you've built becomes popular, if there is a bandwidth limit, you will have to pay for any usage that exceeds the free limit at your own expense. Below are the monthly free bandwidth limits for each hosting service and things to note about what happens if you reach the limit.
| Service Name | Free bandwidth | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | Unlimited | Although there is no limit on bandwidth |
| GitHub Pages | Software 100GB | Not an exact 100GB, but the occasional Reddit chatter is fine |
| GitLab Pages | X000 requests per minute | Nuances and Difficulty |
| Netlify | 100GB | Any excess will incur a fee. |
| AWS S3 | 100GB | Requires credit card registration but tolerates accidental overages |
Regarding why Cloudflare Pages has unlimited bandwidth, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said in a blog post, 'From the beginning, Cloudflare has been determined to make our security tools as widely available as possible. That means providing many tools for free or at minimal cost to help minimize the impact and effectiveness of a wide range of cyber attacks.'
More specifically, Sayer writes, 'Static websites are so lightweight and easy to deliver that it's hardly an issue. For example, this page is about 2.2MB in size, compared to about 2.7MB per page for a typical website . With Cloudflare's ubiquitous network , caching, and optimizations , this is a small improvement. A typical website is nothing like Netflix.'
Furthermore, Sayer noted that companies like Cloudflare benefit from a fast and secure internet. If the internet is fast and reliable, more people want to use it. The more people want to use the internet, the more companies will offer services on the internet. The more companies that offer services on the internet, the greater the need to buy security products. This increases the demand for security products that Cloudflare offers.
In addition, Thayer said that if you get used to Cloudflare's sophisticated UI, you'll definitely want to use other services. That's why Cloudflare has upgrade buttons to paid features all over the place, which is why Cloudflare is a freemium model.
Cloudflare also explains its free plan efforts on its official blog.
Reaffirming our commitment to free
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/
Cloudflare actually lowers the cost of lines by offering a free plan. Cloudflare builds its own network and manages a network capacity of over 300Tbps worldwide. The biggest cost in building a network is bandwidth, and typically you have to pay a connection fee based on the bandwidth to a third-party Internet transit or Internet Service Provider (ISP) that relays connections to other networks. However, by directly connecting networks and exchanging traffic between ISPs, you can send and receive traffic to each other for free.
As the number of services provided using Cloudflare increases, the benefits of connecting directly to Cloudflare from other ISPs and exchanging traffic for free will increase. Cloudflare is lowering its line costs by promoting interconnections with a large number of ISPs, backed by the users it has acquired through its free plan.
Cloudflare lists four additional benefits of offering a free plan:
On our free plan, Cloudflare gives you access to proprietary threat intelligence. This large surface area allows us to identify potential security and reliability issues at the earliest possible stage, often exposing your network to a wide variety of traffic and attacks that you wouldn't normally see. Like an immune system, we can learn from these attacks and adapt to improve our products for all our customers. This is a special competitive advantage, and having visibility into attacks allows us to build products that others can't.
Free users allow us to do quality assurance faster. Free users are often the first to try new products and features. When we release something new, Cloudflare receives instant signals at incredible scale, which we can use to quickly fix bugs and improve our product.
Offering a free plan forces us to build a more intuitive product. Our free users represent a wide range of users, from tech enthusiasts to people who simply want to secure their website or build an application. Building for a wide range of users forces us to create tools that are easier to use for everyone.
Offering a free plan has other benefits too: Some of Cloudflare's most dedicated customers have used our free plan for hobby projects before adopting Cloudflare for their work, and some even ended up working for Cloudflare.
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in Web Service, Posted by logu_ii