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We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

blog.polyhaven.com

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Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#161

If you are worried about getting your blog post to the top of Reddit or Hacker News (I've never been there myself); you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. It's the Bart Simpson method of highly scalability[0], for static content you can have global datacenter coverage in a couple minutes or so if you u…

[deleted]

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. $20/month for Cloudflare Pro is a steal for what you get. Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datace…

> I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. You’re talking past the point here. It doesn’t matter how cheap if you’re fundamentally opposed to enabling cloud flare to reach its meat hooks further into the Internet. This is no different from arguments about embedding google analytics or “just paying for win…

CDNs are a commodity business with tons of competition. Cloudflare is winning by offering a better product.

You should take issue with all the other companies that have failed to deliver something as compelling.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. $20/month for Cloudflare Pro is a steal for what you get. Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datace…

> I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. You’re talking past the point here. It doesn’t matter how cheap if you’re fundamentally opposed to enabling cloud flare to reach its meat hooks further into the Internet. This is no different from arguments about embedding google analytics or “just paying for win…

> You’re talking past the point here

What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you?

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#164
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they could deliver potentially ~300TB with a 1gbps unmetered link. Not that hard to come by, could even get to 3PB for $300/mo. Cloudflare Pro is $20/month per domain. Trying to run everything through a single server in a single datacenter just doesn't compare for globally-accessed websites like this, even with a 1Gbps unmetered link.

I must be missing something, are you able to elaborate on how CentralizedPro Flare for $20 solves the OPs problems? I've accessed plenty of sites physically located in the USA from various EU countries, not to mention AUS and I didn't notice much difference as long as they had a good interconnect. Maybe not the best for YouTube, but there's only a few of those. Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal and fell for CF ear…

> Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal and fell for CF early on but not a fan anymore since they've grown into such a behemoth.

> Absolutely power corrupts absolutely.

This seems to capture the gist of the argument clearly. I hadn't realized cloudflare had grown large enough to fall into the "too big to not be evil" bucket already.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#165

I don't believe Argo is still needed? Tiered Caching is now a free feature.

Yep was also going to mention this. Obviously, Argo still helps with latency and some other things probably, but if they're paying the additional $160 just for tiered caching, they should be able to switch off Argo.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#166
First of all, kudos, I’m a junkie for such optimizations myself. It’s a pleasure that your systems are optimized well, you sleep well and you’re proud :)

Two thoughts:

1) CloudFlare offers incredible service. What would need the team of netadmins/sysadmins can be handled via their UI easily. I use Argo in one project and yes, it is a very efficient tool. CloudFlare is becoming like AWS, knowing its tools is a skill. Maybe one day well see an official CloudFlare Solution Architect certification?.. :))

2) For such traffic heavy websites I don’t think there’s a better combination than Static Websites hosted over CDN, which is cached aggressively and for the dynamic part serverless as a backend. If you configure it properly (cache optimization, rate limiting to not get a huge paycheck if DDoSed, etc…) this setup is like set-up-and-forget-it, without the need to invest loads of resources into it.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#167
post #110

> But, we can get around that because of a partnership between Backblaze and Cloudflare they call the Bandwidth Alliance. This reads like a paid marketing post for Cloudflare. It's astonishing how many times the author conflates browser cache-able assets with cached assets on a CDN. When a browser downloads a static asset if the web server is configured properly those files will be cached and there won't be a need to…

They provide 3D asset downloads, most folks will only be downloading an asset a single time. Therefore, browser side caching doesn't really help, they need to cache the files on a CDN.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. $20/month for Cloudflare Pro is a steal for what you get. Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datace…

> Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case. Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of th…

Anything over 100ms [1] is perceived as not-instant by a user. If you wait 2RTTs with 50ms per round trip, then you've already exceeded this threshold.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-short...

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conflating cloudflare's distributed architecture with distributed control is just silly. It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim. "Non-commercial" might be a better way to understand this point of view. Instead of prioritizing profit (the reason for people using cloudflare, it's cheap and good) the idea is to mi…

> It is extremely centralized control and the CEO of Cloudflare has already terminated accounts of a business he had a personal distaste for on whim. As opposed to the CEO of Amazon/Rackspace/your favorite host here who doesn't have the ability to terminate your account? What are you saying? Or are there other non-profit web hosts and CDNs that I missed? If you have a personal axe to grind against the CEO of Cloudfla…

Superkuh's point is that depending on any single service to protect/host/route your content is setting up oneself up to be Parler'd or 8chan'd. It doesn't matter how good the technology. If you don't any have any control over it, you're one copyright strike or bad mood from a CEO away from being deplatformed.

There's.no need to grind an axe to observe how past actions have set the course for the future, perhaps for the worse.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#170
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they could deliver potentially ~300TB with a 1gbps unmetered link. Not that hard to come by, could even get to 3PB for $300/mo. Cloudflare Pro is $20/month per domain. Trying to run everything through a single server in a single datacenter just doesn't compare for globally-accessed websites like this, even with a 1Gbps unmetered link.

I must be missing something, are you able to elaborate on how CentralizedPro Flare for $20 solves the OPs problems? I've accessed plenty of sites physically located in the USA from various EU countries, not to mention AUS and I didn't notice much difference as long as they had a good interconnect. Maybe not the best for YouTube, but there's only a few of those. Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal and fell for CF ear…

Good network connectivity makes a huge difference.

Back in the day when Joyent ran their public cloud you could beat Cloudflares free plan from Joyents Japan datacenter by a tiny amount in most cases.

Anyway, those days are gone and Cloudflare provides great value and probably the best quality network available. So if you have the problem they solve then you would be a fool to not put some serious thought into considering them.

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