As far as I know there is a good amount of companies that host websites for free( github pages, cloudflare pages, other hosting companies) even intel uses github pages for hosting clear linux website.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
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    5 months ago

    It might not, I don’t use CF for my personal stuff, and at work we have a top tier enterprise plan serving PBs of data every month. That’s what I had heard in the self hosting communities as a recommendation to not put Plex behind CF for that clause. If it’s gone, great!

    But I think the point still holds: they do this to lock you into their ecosystem, and when you outgrow the free tier you’re far more likely to just upgrade to a paid plan than shop around and decide to use another CDN and migrate all your stuff and settings over. Individuals are unlikely to run into any limits, but most companies starting on the free tier will end up on a paid tier at some point unless the startup goes bankrupt. That’s why those companies sees their free tier as free marketing (people recommend them all over the Internet) and as an investment (it costs a couple dollars to host those customers but they likely will give you more dollars later on and offset the cost of providing the free tier).

    Same applies to even private GitHub orgs: they’re free and good up to certain limits, and then they just hope paying the $5/mo when your company grows is far easier and more desirable than packing your repos and moving elsewhere, and have to port over all your repos, wikis, issues, PRs, org structure, pipelines and everything. At that point it costs less to just upgrade to the paid tier than spend hours of your developer’s time just to cheap out on git hosting.