If serving static files to thousands and millions of users is not cloudfront is for then I am not sure what else would a CDN be used for .
You don't need to manage any storage to get your bill to drop, S3 can be fronted by your cached proxy (minio or just plain nginx works easily) it is trivial to setup on OVH or hetzner or any other VPS provider.
You get all the benefits of S3 without the egress bill of a major cloud
“Things I should’ve known but didn’t.” Did you know that “The maximum file size Cloudflare’s CDN caches is 512MB for Free, Pro, and Business customers and 5GB for Enterprise customers.” That’s right, Cloudflare saw requests for a 13.7 GB file and sent them straight to origin every time BY DESIGN. Ouch!
It's another case of misunderstanding and misusing a tool/service in my opinion. Cloudflare (and Cloudfront) are intended to be website CDNs. Their use case is _not_ serving 13.7GB objects - and so they didn't. (Whether "passing those requests straight back to the origin every time" is a better/more customer friendly thing than " blocking those requests since they're not being caches due to an object size rule" is a good question...)
If you want "inexpensive large file hosting/serving", you don't use a combinations of "a service with 11 nines of durability" and "a web-infrastructure and website-security company, providing content-delivery-network". As you rightly point out, duct taping this together on VPS providers competing on low-cost bandwidth is the "right thing" for this use case. The gold-plating of 11 nines of durability and a CDN with over 200 globally distributed POPs almost (perhaps "should have"?) cost this guy $2.5k for "taking the easy way out without thinking through the consequences".
In my head, it's like he had a Tesla Model S in the driveway, and needed to transport 6 tons of lead bricks across town, and thought "I know, I'll just load them up on the back seat and drive 50 miles!" and then getting surprised the car needed expensive repairs afterwards.
It is not the size of file really the problem if he had consumption of 30TB he will still be charged that much .
The b/w costs are very high on the cloud , 5-6x higher than it is outside, I don’t think there any value they provide that justifies it for vast majority of users .
I am pretty skeptical on anyone at all in the world needing 11 nines of durability. You are 100’s of times more likely to have a meteor strike .
All the major service providers have gone down recently. Cloudflare went down just this month . At best they are delivering 4-5 nines practically speaking (loss of one PoP or region is still down )
CDN is exactly the service which needs to be significantly cheaper at scale, if you really need 200 PoPs then you have at minimum 10,000s of users at which and you will have consumption
If the industry’s position is they only want/can service enterprise customers for whom current pricing is within the budget, then their online pricing models/ marketing are incredibly misleading on who they are targeting .
To me it looks like their business models depends on predatory pricing prosumers y hooking them on with the ease of use.
This is very much like credit card industry. If everyone paid on time , CC providers will never make money, predatory loan pricing at 36% or higher is their real revenue source.
Paying on time / reading the ToS only lets them off the hook legally , morally they are both praying on vulnerable users .
Yup that's exactly what I was saying. Cloudfare is designed for website resources, mostly smallish images and bits of JS and CSS. They would probably regard 5MB as a rather large resource. I'm not gonna blame them for having no idea what to do when somebody tries to run a 13.7GB download through them.
You don't need to manage any storage to get your bill to drop, S3 can be fronted by your cached proxy (minio or just plain nginx works easily) it is trivial to setup on OVH or hetzner or any other VPS provider.
You get all the benefits of S3 without the egress bill of a major cloud