# S3 image bandwidth costs are getting annoying

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/s3-image-bandwidth-costs-are-getting-annoying/122052
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Tags:** s3, hosting
**Created:** [July 4, 2019, 1:45am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/s3-image-bandwidth-costs-are-getting-annoying/122052 "2019-07-04T01:45:59Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 4

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### Author: ![bartv](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/bartv/32/130052_2.png) [@bartv](https://meta.discourse.org/u/bartv)
#### Post date: [July 4, 2019, 7:32pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/s3-image-bandwidth-costs-are-getting-annoying/122052/4 "2019-07-04T19:32:02Z")

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I’m using Cloudflare on [my Discourse site](https://blenderartists.org) and it works fine. You basically route all your traffic through Cloudflare and tell it what to process or cache and that’s it. There are a few things to keep in mind though:

1. Configure Cloudflare to NOT cache anything (set up exceptions using page rules, see below).
2. Don’t let Cloudflare touch your Javascript - specifically, turn off Rocket Loader.
3. I’m not sure about Brotli compression yet, I disabled it.
4. Set up page rules to cache the avatar and upload directories as below (ignore rule #1, it’s site specific).

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/5/b/5b3b5bfcf5d81967e9e648d3fa03995140507244.png)

Cloudflare is currently caching a little over 3TB of data per month for me and it’s serving large graphics pretty fast.

If you’re more interested in a CDN I can also recommend [https://www.belugacdn.com/](https://www.belugacdn.com/) (I’m not affiliated with them). I use them on a large WordPress platform and performance is good, at a fraction of the cost of some other CDN platforms I looked at (those might be even more performant, but Beluga meets my needs).

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