Hi, I have been using Cloudflare services for some time now. Recently, I came across Jellyfin which is a media management tool (https://jellyfin.org/). I have been planning to set up Jellyfin on my computer which is behind my WiFi router and then use Cloudflare tunnels (https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared) to make it accessible from the internet. Main reason for this was to watch movies with my friends together.
While setting it up and going through the Jellyfin reddit, I came across comments that disapproved using Cloudflare tunnels for streaming media as it breaks ToS 2.8 https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/. My understanding is that this ToS is only true if you’re proxying the traffic over Cloudflare.
My question is if I disable the Proxy status from Proxied to DNS only, will it still break the ToS? Again, I will be using this Cloudflare tunnel for media transmission from my local computer to some other computer on the internet.
This is the logo that shows up when using DNS only in the proxy settings:
So far, I have checked many community posts and also reddit posts but haven’t got a solid answer to this question. I am on the free plan on Cloudflare so I do not have access to support for these kind of questions. That is why I am writing this community post. I do not want to get my account banned.
Hoping to get an answer to this question by someone qualified (preferably someone from Cloudflare).
You can’t use Cloudflare Tunnels with DNS Only. The Tunnel CNAME targets (xxxx.cfargotunnel.com) are entirely virtual and only work with Proxy enabled.
The idea of enabling DNS-only is that, with a proper web server, Cloudflare would only be acting as a DNS Server (like a traffic director, saying contact X Server/IP for the response), the actual content would be coming directly from your web server over the Internet, without Cloudflare being in the middle, like it is with proxy enabled ().
The downside of this is you would lose all of Cloudflare’s protections, and in the case of Cloudflare Tunnels, it’s just completely impossible. Cloudflare Tunnels establish an outbound connection from your machine to Cloudflare’s edge, there’s no way for it to not go through Cloudflare.
There’s been a lot of posts about tos 2.8 with Cloudflare Tunnel / Argo Tunnel (the old name), you can find
There’s not any with an employee response I can find though. It may be worth keeping in mind that in my experience, Cloudflare will either throttle the domain’s speed, or rewrite video links to a TOS Violated clip, not just flat-out terminate the entire zone on the first strike. There are no exact limits either that you will be able to find.
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