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Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

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11–20 of 34 posts

Re: Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

#11
As other people have stated, you will have trouble finding other CDNs that will be as cheap as CF. That being said, you can always try to do it yourself with a couple of dedicated machines and install varnish on them.

But I have to ask, if you're doing 300TB a month how are you not able to afford $3000 for CF?

Re: Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

#12
I would say that if you are doing 200TB/month then $200/m was too good to be true. Sounds like you have just outgrown your current plan. Have you costed that up on other providers? I assume you where not doing that sort of bandwidth on GCP. It's a different billing model than most clould providers. If you had stuck with GCP the costs would have grown in line with your bandwidth so you would probably be paying the $3000 by now with them. CF could probably do a better job with defining what the products are though.

Re: Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

#13
$200/month is mind-bogglingly cheap for 200-300TB per month.

What are you doing with that much data that it doesn't generate enough value to be worth a few thousand per month?

Maybe CF could have given you a heads up sooner and communicated more clearly from the start. Part of the issue might be that they're making the assumption that their customers (generally more tech savvy) are aware of the value of bandwidth at that volume.

Re: Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

#14
300TB is a lot. No idea what your business is. But that is a lot of data for a medium sized business.

I remember an article here about someone optimizing their cloudflare setup with something else and sending tons of data through some peering agreement. Its 2am and I don’t remember the details. Anyone else remember seeing that?

Re: Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

#16
You expect 300tb for less than 3k? Even that's a steal. Try calling Akamai and it'll be 10s more. Even Keycdn is going to cost you 7k. Sounds like you're serving video and expecting it to be free and complaining you're getting a steal at Cloudflare.

Re: Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

#17
post #2

Are you serving files other then html/images/css, etc? 300tb is a lot, AWS cloudfront would be charging ~$6000/month by a quick estimate. Recognize they were probably taking a loss with your business, I'm surprised you didn't discuss how much bandwidth you were expecting when you agreed to the contract, sounds like a miscommunication.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

#18
Honestly I’m relieved I’d need to get into the hundred+ TB area before I get the sales call. I’d have expected it to be a much lower number.

How are you chucking that much data while still being concerned about cheap? I can’t really suggest anything useful technologically without knowing what the data is

Don’t knee jerk change supplier because you’re annoyed haha, you’re unlikely to get cheaper and kinda likely to get less reliable - that’s on you to justify later to the person asking why your 300TB/mo pipeline broke, not something I’d want to explain without having thought through the initial reaction properly!

At least discuss it with someone first, who knows maybe 3 grand a month isn’t that big an expense considering it’s probably something the company needs to operate. Having a “top level” executive layer implies much more budget elsewhere, it can’t be that big an expense. Maybe they can get rid of a lower level exec to pay for it. Or maybe you don’t need all of the outgoing data. Can’t really guess anything without knowing the situation better

Operating in an annoyed bubble is almost guaranteed to be way more stress down the road though in any case, get a fresh mind on it

Re: Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

#19

BunnyCDN, Beluga, and KeyCDN seem to have pretty decent pricing. If you want another free CDN, you could consider DDOS-Guard albeit with some caution. If you can list a budget, type of content, and/or required features, I can provide a better recommendation. In the meantime, you can sift through the following websites: https://www.cdnperf.com/ https://cdncomparison.com/ https://www.cdnplanet.com

I use bunny.net for my personal websites. I'm largely quite happy with it; it's definitely a great budget option and is very easy to set up.

That being said, it's definitely a budget option. Their admin dashboard, features, PoP count, advanced functionality, etc. is certainly a cut below that of Cloudflare. No HTTP3 support, no brotli compression, stuff like that as well.

Also, they had a configuration issue last night where the certificate for all of y sites was expired for ~3 hours. They fixed it and to be clear it's never happened before, but yeah that kind of thing is probably not going to happen with Cloudflare.

Re: Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

#20
post #19

BunnyCDN, Beluga, and KeyCDN seem to have pretty decent pricing. If you want another free CDN, you could consider DDOS-Guard albeit with some caution. If you can list a budget, type of content, and/or required features, I can provide a better recommendation. In the meantime, you can sift through the following websites: https://www.cdnperf.com/ https://cdncomparison.com/ https://www.cdnplanet.com

I use bunny.net for my personal websites. I'm largely quite happy with it; it's definitely a great budget option and is very easy to set up. That being said, it's definitely a budget option. Their admin dashboard, features, PoP count, advanced functionality, etc. is certainly a cut below that of Cloudflare. No HTTP3 support, no brotli compression, stuff like that as well. Also, they had a configuration issue last nig…

Idk about cf, but amazon,aws,Microsoft,google all have outages. Outages happen.
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