Few, large .mp4 Video Files Download over CDN, no Streaming

General
#1

Hi,
I have a website with mainly “regular” web content.
Though I want to additionally host 1 to 3 .mp4 video files on the site and make them available as downloads for the users. About 4-8GB each.
The original videos should be downloadable only, not be streamed, so no HLS / Adaptive Bitrate Streaming etc.
But I want to accellerate the site as well as the video downloading over Cloudflare CDN and with it, also reduce bandwith on the original hosting site.

I read a lot through this forum and others, but could not find a clear answer to this kind of scenario, as it seems to be kind of an edge case.
As far as I understand it, Cloudflare Stream would not be suited for what I need.
But for regular Cloudflare usage terms this seems to be an edge case. Possibly legal but not sure.
I would either use the Free Plan or if needed the paid Pro Plan.

Or is there some possibility in Cloudflare Stream to just use it to host the video files, but not use the HLS, player etc?

Some info would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Adrian

#2

You’ll likely get in trouble with Terms of Service, as those are pretty big files.

You can put those files in a subdomain that’s not Proxied by Cloudflare, and the rest of your site can be accelerated by proxy.

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#3

Thanks for the quick reply.
Hm, I feared so. But the point is that I want and need them to be accelerated by CloudFlare.
Are you certain it would collide with Terms of Service?
As I said I would be also willling to pay if needed.
This would not be a Video hosting site with 1000s of Videos, and millions of users.
But with 3 videos and maybe max.100 daily users or so.

What about hosting them on Cloudflare Stream?

#4

Cloudflare Stream provides ABR, so is not suitable for your needs.

The maximum file size that Cloudflare will cache is 512 MB, unless you are an Enterprise customer, which means that your cache requirement will not work anyway.

As to the whether the terms would be broken, you should read them yourself, but section 2.8 states that:

Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless…

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#5

Thanks.
Didn’t expect it’s so hard to host a Video file somewhere.
Then I fear something like Amazon Cloudfront is the only option I have (super expensive)

#6

If you just want to have the files available to download why not just put them on DropBox or a similar site and link to them from your website?

#7

It does seem that a traditional CDN is the proper approach, though Cloudfront would be one of the more expensive options. BunnyCDN seems to be popular, but when it comes to large files, I don’t think latency is that critical. Granted, distance does slow it down a bit, but is the cost difference of a CDN worth it? Backblaze B2 might be a bit cheaper than Bunny, but isn’t CDN.

#8

Because with such large Files you will hit the Bandwidth Limits of Services like GDrive Onedrive or Dropbox super fast.
For Dropbox you at least know what this is, but for the others, your file will just get blocked at some point without any notice.

This is what I initially thought as well, but if you have a large file and just a medium user base, say 100 downloads per month, GDrive, Onedrive, Dropbox etc will not work, or at least not reliable and preditable.

#9

Thanks so much for the tip!
This is game chaning. Did not come across Bunny or Backblaze B2 so far.
Perfectly suited for the scenario.
From my research so far Bunny Storage + BunnyCDN is actualy equally cheap as Backblaze B2, but offers true CDN and thus faster speed.

In my scenario around 10x cheaper than Amazon S3+Cloudfront

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