Too much traffic will violate TOS 2.8 , and CF will enforce 302 on your site

Performance
#1

Most of .jpg/.png are being redirected by 302, here is an example:

$ curl /non-exists.jpg -v

  • Trying 104.22.56.125…
  • TCP_NODELAY set
  • Connected to (104.22.56.125) port 80 (#0)

GET /non-exists.jpg HTTP/1.1
Host:
User-Agent: curl/7.58.0
Accept: /

< HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
< Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2021 18:47:57 GMT
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
< Connection: keep-alive
< Set-Cookie: __cfduid=; expires=Sun, 21-Mar-21 18:47:57 GMT; path=/; domain=; HttpOnly; SameSite=Lax; Secure
< Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
< Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT
< Location: https://www.cloudflare-terms-of-service-abuse.com/streaming.jpg
< cf-request-id:
< X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
< Server: cloudflare
< CF-RAY:
< alt-svc: h3-27=":443"; ma=86400, h3-28=":443"; ma=86400, h3-29=":443"; ma=86400
<

  • Connection #0 to host left intact
    ==============================

It is hilarious that even my website logo is being redirected to a warning message.

The filename mentioned “streaming”, while we are a video streaming website of user-generated contents and only use Cloudflare as a CDN for our HTML pages and JPEG/PNG images.

As said from the engineers in support tickets, my website have some traffic that are non-HTML and cause too much traffic.

It is how they treat a Business plan user who cause 111.31 TB on Cloudflare CDN in last 30 days, mostly from JPEG images, while I knew there are many other websites cause much more traffic than us.

Just wanna know if there are any other Cloudflare users cause similar level of traffic and got restricted.

The original text from support ticket:

You previously received an email notification from Cloudflare regarding temporary altered performance to your domain.

This was automatically triggered because of network congestion we’re seeing associated with your domain. This is not a review or judgment on you or your content, it is what we need to do in order to keep Cloudflare great for the millions of our customers.

Once we see that the congestion associated with your domain has subsided, our remediation will automatically lift.

Please note that if the sole purpose of your website is to distribute non-HTML content via our CDN, we won’t be able to lift the restrictions placed on your domain.

You can view which non-HTML content triggered this message by following this URL:

Once you have removed the contents that is generating the huge bandwidth from our network, our system will automatically remove the replacement images.
If you wish to deliver videos to your visitors via CDN, you can consider our Stream product:

You can consider upgrading to Enterprise Plan where we do not have this kind of restrictions enforced.
If you’re interested, we can forward you to our sales team to discuss further.

More information on 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content.

#2

I only know that some Users on the Free Plan their Account got Terminated for same Reason.
Its a known Secret that such things happen when you have a big Multi Media Website.

Asking me if you had Enterprise Subscription instead of Bussines
if they would also act like this.

Ahh well they Answered this Question in the Ticket.
interessting to know !

From my own Experience with other Hosters like Google
Traffic is Expensive.

With other Hosters for such a triffc you have to Pay easy 10’000 USD each Month instead of the 200 USD.

Cloudflare Provides best Price to Value Hosting but for Big Media Websites clearly the Bussiness Subscription plan is not enough as the Traffic Cost easy excede the Monthly Bussiness Plan Fee and do not Cover the Costs in such a Case.

#3

The reason why the ticket included the Enterprise plan suggestion was I complained that templated answers were copied serval times.

When we were small and our traffic was much lesser, some sales contacted us for the Enterprise plan on video streaming, so we know the basic cost of Enterprise plan and I understand why you stated a number like USD10000.

The video streaming generates much more traffic than 100TB per month, the cost of hosting with petabytes of traffic data is not a big deal for us :wink: You just paid too much as we can deliver multiple times of 100TB with cost of USD200 per month :pleading_face:The only problem was the responsive time of image loading, it is still much faster on CDN than on our own server as it is more prone to the 100ms+ difference, unlike video streaming which can be buffered.

As I said, I knew there are quite a lot of Pro plan users generated much more traffic than us.

I won’t say the monthly fee doesn’t cover CF’s cost as it is not my problem. There are much more of Free plan users using CF, and I believe that CF had their own strategy to control their cost as a market giant.

#4

We found the best solution: Cancel the business plan and we host the images by our own servers.

We are happy that the server costs lesser than $200, which were saved from the cost paid to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare saved it traffic from its network.

As a Free Plan user currently, I don’t need to worry about my website logo is being redirected to a scary warning message.

Thank you for the Cloudflare Engineers who pushed us forward to make our own solution on image caching. You all can now close the support tickets and mark it as solved, KPIs are fine :smile: