Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
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Re: Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
#2why can't he use the free cloudflare?
A static website cached by cloudflare seems very vanilla.
Also, why S3? this seems very easy to do with Linode or anything else similarly cheap or cheaper ($20 gets you a KVM VPS with 2 Gb nowadays)
Unless you have to regenerate constantly, all it needs is nginx, to serve the pages to Cloudflare edges when thry drop out of the cache
Re: Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
#3why can't he use the free cloudflare? A static website cached by cloudflare seems very vanilla. Also, why S3? this seems very easy to do with Linode or anything else similarly cheap or cheaper ($20 gets you a KVM VPS with 2 Gb nowadays) Unless you have to regenerate constantly, all it needs is nginx, to serve the pages to Cloudflare edges when thry drop out of the cache
I was previously using Cloudflare in conjunction with a Linode server. The disadvantage of this, however, is that you need to ensure that one server never goes down otherwise anyone hitting a cold cache would see the site down.
Also, why do you need a server at all? If you are doing nothing but serving static files then why incur the overhead of maintaining LetsEncrypt certificates and writing Nginx config files? AWS provides a simple interface in which you can view and manage your static files without having to ssh into a server.
On the point of price, I'm predicting my total cost of hosting for a site serving roughly 40-45k users per month will be roughly $7/month. All whilst minimizing the amount of administration time required and monitoring of a more traditional system.
Hope this clarifies this, would be keen to hear any counter thoughts!
Re: Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
#4Cost-comparisons aside, the massive speed improvement makes me think he didn't have caching configured correctly with Cloudflare and his PHP backend (thus defeating the entire point of the CDN aspect).
I'm guessing a couple of Cache-Control: headers would have provided similar latency improvements.
Re: Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
#5why can't he use the free cloudflare? A static website cached by cloudflare seems very vanilla. Also, why S3? this seems very easy to do with Linode or anything else similarly cheap or cheaper ($20 gets you a KVM VPS with 2 Gb nowadays) Unless you have to regenerate constantly, all it needs is nginx, to serve the pages to Cloudflare edges when thry drop out of the cache
S3 is going to be more reliable than anything you can reasonably be expected to administrate yourself, and it's cheaper as well. It's also supported by all CI tools, so you just script the deployment based on git commits.
Re: Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
#6Spaces + BunnyCDN is even cheaper. ;)
$6/month = 250GB of static websites + domain registration fees.
If you want to get really cheap, OVH's cloud storage is basically free but you lose https. ($.01/GB of traffic/storage roughly)
Re: Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
#7Cost-comparisons aside, the massive speed improvement makes me think he didn't have caching configured correctly with Cloudflare and his PHP backend (thus defeating the entire point of the CDN aspect). I'm guessing a couple of Cache-Control: headers would have provided similar latency improvements.
Comparisons were done with CloudFlare on static site, it's been a very long time since the site was based on Laravel and PHP.
I had set Browser Cache Expiration to 1 month within my CloudFlare settings as was luckily screenshotted within a previous article: https://medium.com/@elliot_f/my-journey-into-web-speed-optim...
I'm fairly sure that I had some speed optimizations set within my Nginx server block. Unfortunately, I don't have the Nginx config file to hand anymore as I've (somewhat stupidly) deleted the snapshots without taking a backup.
Re: Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
#8Cost-comparisons aside, the massive speed improvement makes me think he didn't have caching configured correctly with Cloudflare and his PHP backend (thus defeating the entire point of the CDN aspect). I'm guessing a couple of Cache-Control: headers would have provided similar latency improvements.
Comparisons were done with CloudFlare on static site, it's been a very long time since the site was based on Laravel and PHP. I had set Browser Cache Expiration to 1 month within my CloudFlare settings as was luckily screenshotted within a previous article: https://medium.com/@elliot_f/my-journey-into-web-speed-optim... I'm fairly sure that I had some speed optimizations set within my Nginx server block. Unfortunatel…
I'm no Cloudflare nor Cloudfront expert but these should be apples-to-apples comparisons and seeing that huge disparity in latency makes me think it's most likely a configuration issue, as all comparisons I've ever seen claim they perform roughly about the same: https://blog.latency.at/2017-09-06-cdn-comparison/
Specifically though we're talking about how long Cloudflare caches your content on their proxy/edge servers. Browser caching is irrelevant for this discussion, as speed tests of this nature should always be performed on a clean request.
Re: Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
#9I have set up some sites the same way, the only ugly part for me was that I wanted to use the features of S3 web hosting interface, but restrict all traffic to come through CloudFront. This blog post (not mine) describes the problem and the approach: https://abridge2devnull.com/posts/2018/01/restricting-access...
Re: Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparisons were done with CloudFlare on static site, it's been a very long time since the site was based on Laravel and PHP. I had set Browser Cache Expiration to 1 month within my CloudFlare settings as was luckily screenshotted within a previous article: https://medium.com/@elliot_f/my-journey-into-web-speed-optim... I'm fairly sure that I had some speed optimizations set within my Nginx server block. Unfortunatel…
I'm no Cloudflare nor Cloudfront expert but these should be apples-to-apples comparisons and seeing that huge disparity in latency makes me think it's most likely a configuration issue, as all comparisons I've ever seen claim they perform roughly about the same: https://blog.latency.at/2017-09-06-cdn-comparison/ Specifically though we're talking about how long Cloudflare caches your content on their proxy/edge server…
I can't claim I am either, unfortunately. I required assistance ensuring the certs were in place and my configuration was correct when doing the migration.
And just to clarify, based on some of the articles I've read, I actually think CloudFlare may be a better choice of CDN, this post just highlights one way of achieving a global-scale website and doing it in such a way that it's resilient and cheap as chips!