Can I use CloudFlare as a video provider?

video cdn cloudflare
Student of Hogwarts picture Student of Hogwarts · Sep 2, 2012 · Viewed 29.3k times · Source

I'm creating a website where people can upload and watch videos. I'm expecting 1000 simultaneous viewers at all times (on average). The problem is that all the CDNs I've looked at charges about $0.06/GB. This means that 0,17 MB/s (720p) x 1000 users x 60 seconds x 60 minutes / 1024 = $36 an hour to host!

Am I missing something?

Over at CloudFlare you don't pay for the bandwith. Does this mean that I can get it really cheap at CloudFlare. Isn't that too good to be true?

Answer

Simon East picture Simon East · Apr 4, 2014

UPDATE FOR 2018!
Cloudflare now has a streaming video service to complement their CDN, so that would definitely be the first place to look. But if you just want to host a few MP4 files on your site and save a bit of bandwidth, the following post might still be relevant.

Assuming your video content is simply a file downloaded over HTTP/HTTPS (and not streamed over some other protocol) then it appears that CloudFlare might actually support this.

I just tested an MP4 video file on a client's website and it appeared to be cached by CloudFlare correctly.

My CloudFlare settings page rule:

enter image description here

The request (which shows a cache hit):

enter image description here

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