As far as I know there is a good amount of companies that host websites for free( github pages, cloudflare pages, other hosting companies) even intel uses github pages for hosting clear linux website.

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)English
    2•9 months ago

    basic Cloudflare is free but downloads and video streaming through their free tier is technically against ToS.

    Are you sure that’s still the case?
    There doesn’t seem to be anything like that here anymore: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/

    But in the past there was clause 2.8:

    2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content

    The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services.

    • Max-P
      1•9 months ago

      It might not, I don’t use CF for my personal stuff, and at work we have a top tier enterprise plan serving PBs of data every month. That’s what I had heard in the self hosting communities as a recommendation to not put Plex behind CF for that clause. If it’s gone, great!

      But I think the point still holds: they do this to lock you into their ecosystem, and when you outgrow the free tier you’re far more likely to just upgrade to a paid plan than shop around and decide to use another CDN and migrate all your stuff and settings over. Individuals are unlikely to run into any limits, but most companies starting on the free tier will end up on a paid tier at some point unless the startup goes bankrupt. That’s why those companies sees their free tier as free marketing (people recommend them all over the Internet) and as an investment (it costs a couple dollars to host those customers but they likely will give you more dollars later on and offset the cost of providing the free tier).

      Same applies to even private GitHub orgs: they’re free and good up to certain limits, and then they just hope paying the $5/mo when your company grows is far easier and more desirable than packing your repos and moving elsewhere, and have to port over all your repos, wikis, issues, PRs, org structure, pipelines and everything. At that point it costs less to just upgrade to the paid tier than spend hours of your developer’s time just to cheap out on git hosting.