Edit: See replies below. Cloudflare CEO says this use case is fine.
This is a cool project and something I will probably use for some hobby projects.
I would caution against it for anything more than a hobby project as it violates the Cloudflare TOS:
> 2.8 Limitation on Non-HTML Caching
> The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited.
https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/
For something small, they won't care. If your images make the front page of reddit, you might get shut down.
That’s only for our traditional service. For Workers the ToS is different. Don’t see anything troubling about this project!
Workers are being used to do some URL rewriting.
The main point of this article is to use a Cloudflare cache-everything rule and use that caching to create a free image host. From the article:
> I'd heavily recommend adding a page-rule to set the "cache level" to "everything", and "edge cache TTL" to a higher value like 7 days if your files aren't often changing.
The guy you replied to is the CEO of cloudflare. If he says it's OK then I'm pretty sure it's OK!
^—- what he said.
In that case, thanks for the blessing. :)
I am not saying not to trust the word of the CEO, but this exact use case of using cloudflare as a image hosting comes up a lot on HN.
The word on the street is that they will start throttling and contacting you once you hit several hundred TB per month. [1][2][3][4][5][6]
Of course this is still extremely generous and the upgrade plans are usually still several orders of magnitude cheaper than any cloud provider per gb. But don't build a business or hobby project around cf providing unlimited free bandwidth forever.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20139191
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368684
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13580113
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12826389
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5214480
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19829740
(basically search HN for cloudflare + non-html)
To be fair, I was expecting to be contacted for this unlimited service way way waaay before hundreds of TB per month.
He might be the CEO but things change after an IPO. I hope Cloudflare stays great. I love their service.
Not only do things change but CF has hundreds of employees that weren't CC'd on that informal permission so there's still a high chance of being inconvenienced, and there's a decent chance the CEO won't be at your disposable should a problem occur.
Should CloudFlare later ban you for the practice, will the random support person you reach unpack the CEO's comments here and ensure nothing changed internally that prevents allowing your continued use and advocate restoring your account for you?
It’s not so different from when your company provides a perk that you expect not to see again.
If the perk saves you money, you put that money in savings. Once your budget expands to depend on that perk you are trapped, and when it goes away the pain will be noteworthy.
In words that are more applicable to a business case: You have to have a strategy for when the Too Good To Be True situation ends, because it will, and you have less control over when than you think you do.
Thanks for engaging directly with the community!
Hey Matthew! It's a darn cool project!
So this wouldn't be allowed if he didn't use workers to make a redirect?