Because Cloudflare is so critical to me and my online presence (for example, it’s the authoritative DNS provider of the domain I use for my email and now also my actual domain registrar), I decided that it would be a good idea to re-review the Self-Serve Subscription Agreement in order to make sure that my account is in good standing and not at any significant risk of being terminated (though I understand that they could if they wanted to even for no reason). I don’t know if Cloudflare specifically has a reputation for this, but I think we have all heard some horror stories regarding major platform providers kicking people off for… let’s say dubious reasons and causing massive problems for the customer.
I’ve been using Cloudflare since 2013, and I used to have multiple actual websites on the Pro plan; however, all of my domains/sites currently just redirect elsewhere via Page Rules. This is due to a combination of:
- being “in-between” business ventures (sold my old one, new one not officially up yet)
- scrapping the blog I had on my primary personal domain and having it temporarily just redirect to my Twitter
- previously did some domain investing, so I have over 100 domains in my account and most just redirect to a DIY “WHOIS” document I made using GitHub Pages with a custom domain (a subdomain on my primary personal domain)
Looking over the Cloudflare ToS, it looks like I may actually be violating it…? 0_0 These are the parts that concern me the most:
- (b) interfere with, disrupt, alter, or modify the Services or any part thereof, or create an undue burden on the Services or the networks or services connected to the Services, including, but not limited to, causing (whether directly or indirectly) traffic for your Cloudflare-proxied domain to be sent to an IP address that was not assigned by Cloudflare for the domain;
- 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.
This worries me because I am technically “sending traffic” (via Page Rules forwarding) to GitHub Pages and my Twitter profile, and because the top content type in analytics is just “empty” because of this forwarding (although the domains do forward to normal HTML web pages).
I’m literally using less than 1GB of bandwidth per month, but now I’m kind of worried that I’m going to get kicked off. Am I actually violating the ToS, and if so, would Cloudflare actually kick me off for this?
Thank you for your time.
setting on DNS records, this is not an issue.