At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. That means making the Internet faster, smarter, safer, but also more cost efficient with the help of our partners. We are always on the lookout for ways to help save customers money. With that goal we announced the Bandwidth Alliance with our founding partners during our Birthday week.
The key concept of the Bandwidth Alliance is to help reduce and in many cases waive data transfer charges, sometimes known as "bandwidth” or “egress” charges, for our mutual customers. We achieve this in partnership with the founding partners through strongly interconnected networks over peered connections. These connections typically occur within the same facility with no middleman. So, neither Cloudflare nor the cloud provider bears incremental costs. Further, we will also use our smart routing system (read details in this technical blog post) to ensure that all our customers’ traffic on participating cloud providers, once their systems are set up, qualify for this offer.
Expanding the Alliance: new Partners Committed to Discounting Data Transfer Fees
We are proud to announce the following cloud providers and hosting companies have joined the Bandwidth Alliance in committing to zero data transfer fees for mutual customers. Below is the list of companies from whom you’ll be able to get zero data transfer fees as a Cloudflare customer. If you're hosted with any member of the Bandwidth Alliance, your data transfer fees should decrease as soon as the required technical and accounting systems are activated. Click on each partner to learn more.
We are especially excited to note the global nature of these partners, expands the Alliance and allows customers in many parts of the world to take advantage of the Alliance. The requests to join the Alliance have been significant and we are working to onboard further partners from both a technical and business perspective.
This is an open alliance of like-minded companies and if you are a cloud provider or networking company and aren't listed, we encourage you to email [email protected] with a request for inclusion.
Customer Benefit
The Bandwidth Alliance is providing this benefit to all Cloudflare customers at no additional cost. Our partners provide an a wide variety of choices of cloud services and products.
We are working with our founding partners to make it even easier to use our services jointly. We are helping an initial set of customers use cloud storage with their Cloudflare service and zero data transfer fees. These customers were looking for a best of breed solution with specific storage and delivery needs. Please read this technical architecture post by Kirk Schwenkler describing the considerations in enabling such a solution.
This is a starting point and we expect to be developing many reference architectures with our partners to allow our customers to have a truly best of breed option without any concerns on transfer fees.
Here is what the joining members say:
“Open, affordable and free internet is what we strive for and what we give to our clients. Everyone and every company should have access to it. We are thrilled that the values shared by the Bandwidth Alliance can also be our values.”
Marcin Kowalski, Senior Product Manager at Data Space
"DNSnetworks is proud to become a partner in Cloudflare’s initiative for a global bandwidth alliance. Reducing the cost of bandwidth for partners and not-for-profit businesses fits into our mission of giving back to the community that has provided us with their business and trust."
Kevin Conroy, VP Cloud Operations at DNSnetworks
“At Host1Plus we believe in long-term connections. Therefore, we simplify and personalize the customer experience for our clients to entrust their infrastructure to us. By joining this alliance, we empower our customers to scale their businesses easily across the globe. We look forward to working together with the Bandwidth Alliance and offer the fastest connections to Host1Plus and Cloudflare customers”
Vincentas Grinius, CEO & Founder at Host1Plus
"At Vultr, we strive to provide the most predictable cloud platform to all of our customers. Joining the Bandwidth Alliance, in partnership with Cloudflare, furthers our vision by being able to provide zero egress to our mutual customers."
David Aninowsky, Founder/CEO at Vultr
"In March of 2018, Wasabi pioneered the cloud storage industry’s first ‘unlimited free egress’ pricing plan. We are excited to join forces with Cloudflare and the Bandwidth Alliance, validating that the early business models of Cloud 1.0 vendors no longer applies in a world that expects unlimited everything. This partnership is another way of slingshotting our mutual customers into a future that is already here today."
David Friend, CEO and co-founder at Wasabi