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Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery

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Re: Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery

#51
post #31

I wouldn't use this, because it seems odd to use a Cloudflare Worker for something inherently static, but I thought about what I might use, and bunny.net came to mind. Now I have a question, which is why on the Bunny.net pricing page doesn't it mention Cloudflare? https://bunny.net/pricing/ It mentions CDN77, BytePlus, CacheFly, CloudFront, and Fastly. Is what Cloudflare provides in a different market segment?

> It mentions CDN77, BytePlus, CacheFly, CloudFront, and Fastly. Is what Cloudflare provides in a different market segment? Cloudflare's pricing is "free until you get a message from the sales team that it's time to pay up". That's impossible to compare to anything else, so yes effectively a different market segment.

Yup, been there. I was serving more than 45 TB of data a month on one site, and they tried to push me into a $4,000/mo product.

I’ll stick with my $20 subscription, thanks.

Re: Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. Honest question: how technical are your clients? I’m trying to get a sense of whether there’s a market where paying $2.99 a month is a better choice than moving the domain to Cloudflare.

You don't need to "move the domain to Cloudflare"

If someone can get Cloudflare caching working without changing nameservers, then yes, this plugin does not offer anything new for that case.

Re: Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery

#54
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this plugin is aimed at the long tail and I need to be clear on a fair use policy. The idea behind the self host worker is that I can provide white glove migration if any site becomes burdensome without disrupting the service altogether. And I agree, if a site is behind Cloudflare DNS this plugin does not make much sense, but it's a solution for many non-technical users, as you mentioned.

Do the long tail websites really have a problem with cost for their delivery? I don't think so. I'm sorry to say that with this plugin, you're just adding to the pervasive tracking enabled by widespread use of Cloudflare.

Do they? I honestly do not know yet. That is what I am trying to learn.

Re: Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery

#55
post #39

> Privacy > Bandwidth Saver respects your privacy and your visitors’ privacy: Does not track visitors...Does not collect analytics Wouldn't this cause a site's visitors to send traffic to cloudflare in situations where they wouldn't otherwise, allowing cloudflare to log their IP, timestamp, and the image requested, along with any other data in the request header? If this plugin wasn't used on the site cloudflare woul…

I came here to say this. I find the following to be quite misleading: Bandwidth Saver respects your privacy and your visitors’ privacy: Does not track visitors Does not use cookies Does not collect analytics Does not phone home Because all that tracking and data collection will be done by Cloudflare (a company subject to the CLOUD act) instead.

Noted. I agree the current wording is not clear enough about what Cloudflare logs. I am going to rewrite that section so it is more explicit.

Re: Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea here is that WordPress will still host and transform the images (could have many stacked plugins as a pipeline) but the plugin will rewrite the final image's URL to be served by Cloudflare. So you can benefit of whatever pipeline you have in the server, and let the plugin use cloudflare at the edge.

That is what Cloudflare already does by caching images

Right. The target user is not using Cloudflare nameservers.

Re: Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery

#57
post #36

How many WordPress sites even need this? I have several running and none of them use anywhere close to enough bandwidth that I have to worry about it.

Agreed. I think it should be called "storage saver" and focus on deleting the images from your server and storing in r2, though there's plenty of plugins already that do this "media offloading"

That could work as a separate plugin. This one is intentionally not an offloader. WordPress keeps storage and transformations, I only rewrite the final URL.

Re: Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so i could. say. have a squid proxy on a $5 unmetered vps, referring to WP as a content-origin and then just use this to rewrite the image URL without using cloudflare at all? (also possible with an apache directive but , doing it in WP could be useful) and could you not .. just do the same for your $2.99 customers so you dont get a surprise $2000 bill or find yourself told by cloudflare that its time to pay up? alth…

Thanks for the detailed reply. Let me try to clear up a few things, because I think we are talking about slightly different use cases. The plugin is not trying to replace Cloudflare, Squid, Minio, or any other origin setup. It also is not an offloader. WordPress still stores the files and keeps whatever transformation pipeline you already use. The plugin only rewrites the final image URL so the request hits a Worker…

it was an afterthought, but doing something like rsync’ing the wp-uploads directory to a remote http folder might be the most accessible/easy way for a less technical audience.

i think thats the first tack i took.

but then just using wordpress itself as the origin server made the fetch and availability immediate.

and then yeah if youre accomplishing that thing,and filling that gap in. that would be useful and i might give it a try!

ive gone about doing this, in effect, about five or six different ways and youre on the right track for something useful that, no, nobodys (exactly) offering yet. unless you want to go all static which begets other problems like no native comment functionality.

or, use an existing “static website generator” solely to mirror your wp-uploads on publication but then not actually use a static site ;)

youre pitching an in-between for the media. and there is one other plugin that will optimize cloudflare but there was some reason i rejected it. ( i think it irreparably broke the entire site on being disabled or uninstalled so if cloudflare was down and you wanted to just point DNS at your naked IP. you were going to be restoring your database.)

it would be super nice to be able to turn this on/off at will- as others have asked “what if cloudflare is down” , or what if your account gets sanctioned by CF—

well there you go, disable this plugin for an immediate workaround . no need to log into cloudflare or a linux shell to kill or edit my rewrite rules if i can just disable a plugin from the convenience of the wp-admin UI.

you already clarified that all the content is safe and intact locally!

i am not aware of other plugins that would make that part this easy.

Re: Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery

#59
post #30

We serve over 100 WordPress websites, some with relatively high traffic. I've never encountered a Cloudflare issue with image caching. I am a little confused about what this is all about. We also have our own CDN-ish DigitalOcean droplets with Terabytes of data transfer available (stacked droplets increase the TB limit under the same account, too). This is a $10-$15 solution for 100+ WordPress sites. Small droplets (…

Thanks for the detailed perspective. Your setup makes sense for agencies or teams that can manage their own caching, droplets, image formats, and traffic patterns. In that environment a plugin like this is not really needed. The plugin is aimed at a different group. A lot of WordPress users are not on Cloudflare, do not want to touch DNS, and are not comfortable running their own CDN proxy or tuning image formats. Th…

But those small clients also do not know much about WordPress and use nearly unlimited traffic hosting. It would be a challenge to explain what your plugin does.

Re: Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery

#60
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the detailed perspective. Your setup makes sense for agencies or teams that can manage their own caching, droplets, image formats, and traffic patterns. In that environment a plugin like this is not really needed. The plugin is aimed at a different group. A lot of WordPress users are not on Cloudflare, do not want to touch DNS, and are not comfortable running their own CDN proxy or tuning image formats. Th…

But those small clients also do not know much about WordPress and use nearly unlimited traffic hosting. It would be a challenge to explain what your plugin does.

You are right that a lot of those clients are on “unlimited” hosting and never think about bandwidth at all. I am still trying to figure out how big the overlap is between “does not want to touch Cloudflare” and “actually cares about image performance.” This thread is helping me sanity check whether that overlap is real or just in my head.
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