> it’s against the terms of service to use it for video
It for any large files. They want to limit bandwidth usage but not blanket limit everyone. One user using Plex of Jellyfin probably doesn't move the needle.
Yes and that's what people are criticizing - it's just an arbitrary and thus very bad rule. Completely unrelated to CloudFlare, I streamed a single TV series from a friend's plex account 1-2y ago, that's less traffic than some of my friends use in 2 weeks.
I'm not saying they can't have that rule, it's their infra - I'm just saying that "a boatload of bandwidth" can be anything, depending on who you ask.
Not sure if you are a representative from Cloudflare. But regardless, Cloudflare intentionally made it ambiguous so that they can selectively enforce it.
For sure. But OPs point still stands, people run giant Plex servers and charge for access to the pirated content on them. Huge numbers of users. I imagine they want to enforce on those folks and not people who just happen to have their own running.
Why would anyone expect anyone else to serve video for them for free? Is there any CDN that serves video for you for free???
I'm not even talking about the copyright implications here, just the bandwidth costs. A single movie download would cost more than many hundreds of typical simple HTTP website sessions.
> Why would anyone expect anyone else to serve video for them for free?
I would expect that a freemium service selling encrypted "zero trust" networking should have no idea what traffic is being pushed through my network making enforcement impossible.
Nobody's asking for a free lunch, but the reasonable thing to do would be to simply bandwidth limit freemium accounts across the board, not make exceptions for certain kinds of traffic in what should be a secure network.
Cloudflare does say "video and other large files" so in the end it is about volume, not data type. They probably just want to have the arbitrary decision on specific cases without defining a uniform blanket limit.
You can use Cloudflare for DNS, but you just can’t use them for proxying the traffic. I use Cloudflare with proxying on for everything other than a plex subdomain.
The specific term is: https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...