Cloudflare tunnels have been a blessing for me, as someone locked behind an apartments router trying to host services without the ability to forward ports. The fact that it's free, is the cherry on top.
FWIW you can do the same thing with a cloud server & a couple bucks a month. I use AWS/t4g.nano reserved instance & WireGuard, and I think it runs me less than half a beer a month.
If you're going to pay for AWS, might as well use Oracle's free tier. It is extremely generous. And you have to specifically change a setting to leave the free tier; So you it's not that easy to get accidentally billed for a misconfig.
Yes, yes...I know..."ORACLE"!? choking sounds But at this point, they're no worse a company than Amazon. I've been very happy with their free tier for my home use. There's a bit of learning curve...just like AWS, but they give you a ton of free stuff, including training.
> Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true:
> * CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 15%
> * Network utilization is less than 15%
> * Memory utilization is less than 15% (applies to A1 shapes only)
And here's the email that I get whenever they reclaim an instance:
> Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has reclaimed idle Always Free compute resources from Always Free customers by stopping the compute instance(s). Reclaiming idle resources allows OCI to efficiently provide services to Always Free customers. Your account had one or more idle compute instances that have been stopped. You can restart your compute instance as long as the associated compute shape is available in your region. Your Boot and Block Volumes remain unchanged and available to you. In the future, you can keep idle compute instances from being stopped by converting your account to Pay As You Go (PAYG). With PAYG, you will not be charged as long as your usage for all OCI resources remains within the Always Free limits.
Yes - so i'm not sure why it doesn't seem to actually happen to me, my instance definitely sits idle like that a lot. All free Oracle accounts must have a payment method, it was mandatory when creating the account.
It's not super random. They email your before at least. Mine has been shut down once in 3 months. Which I think is fair enough considering I run 2 machines with 8gb RAM each and 2 arm cores each. Insane value.
there have been a few reports of oracle randomly terminating services for people who only use the free tier, i’d rather pay a meager fee than get unpredictably evicted
I am not sure this is 100 percent but the Internet says you can upgrade to the paid tier and they won't evict you. You can use the same always free resources. In terms of unexpected fees, if you open a free tier account, let the free trial expire, basically whatever you can then do will also be free when you upgrade.
tbh running a free service on the internet requires unilateral termination of service for "bad citizens". totally different story whether it was justified in specific cases.
I'm not sure. I have my "play" AWS account, for Alexa apps, connected to my Amazon account but I don't really have a single credit card on my Amazon account, it always asks which one to use, so I don't think so.
How have you found it for hosting services? I found it struggled with something as simple as an Apache webserver, though perhaps that's just something to do with my internet itself.
I've had my Plex server behind Cloudflare Tunnels for years, never had any performance or reliability issues.
Another great use case is for SSH to a server quite some distance away. I find that the latency when using a cloudflare tunnel to SSH on average better than whatever route my ISP would normally take.
Unless I'm missing something here, there's no way Cloudflare is allowing that much traffic through tunnels for free. Is this just setting up the initial plex connection through the tunnel and then going p2p?
Nope, 100% of my external users go through CF tunnels. The downside is that the caching results in the entire file being cached immediately if the user is not using transcoding, but most of my users are utilizing transcoding. I put a bandwidth limiter on my Cloudflare tunnel to limit it to 100Mbps
I don't have any actual stats, but there appear to be about 10-20 hours a day of remote streaming, mostly at 3Mbps. So we're only looking at 400-800GB on average per month.
Also, you can use Cloudflare unregistered free tunnels just like the article, but using registered tunnels makes it so you don't have to update the Plex url every time you reconnect. I used unregistered tunnels until Cloudflare made tunnels available on free tier accounts with no bandwidth charges.
Ive been using a tunnel to share my jellyfin server to friends for about a year. Its pretty much a proxy for it (add jellyfin:port to the config, start cloudflared, access on jellyfin.my.domain on cloudflare).
I havent had any issues with bandwidth but it depends on how much you push through it. Ive seen stories throughout the years of people pushing 30-50TB before getting a temp ban from using cloudflare services. Of course DNS still works but you just cant use their proxy/cdn/tunnels/etc
I've pushed quite a lot of traffic over Tunnels with no issues - IME it performs just as well as sending the traffic over Cloudflare without the Tunnel.
the internet is not going to accept bigger packets just because someone wants to add vpn-encapsulation (additional data). you either account for the overhead (mssfix) or your payload gets fragmented and performance goes to shit, deal with it 8)
