Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?
The site this is about is current down due to HN traffic.
Lol
Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
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Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#22Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?
Depends on your use case. If you have a very inefficient backend (maybe legacy project?), you have massive amount of traffic (say 100K req/s or above) or you really must have sub-500ms latency absolutely everywhere in the world, then it might make sense to slap a CDN (or similar) on top of that. In pretty much any case outside of that, it makes no sense to waste the time, money or effort on CDNs. But, all the CDN com…
Data scraping.
If anything else, the AI machine wants near constant streams of new data, even if it already checked with you 30ms ago.
A CDN helps immensely.
Also keeps you from getting DDoS'd if you did something like run it off your home connection.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#23Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there
They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up.
I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#24Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?
Because an average request would have to travel half the globe, so setting up a simple HTTPS connection would already take a second. That's completely unacceptable for static content.
Not only would transfer be slow, they would also be much more pressing on the network as the request would occupy huge stretches and many interconnects and switches.
Furthermore, it hardens the website against DDoS and adds robustness for regional failures.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#25The problem is that we have spent 40 years adopting US technology, across multiple generations of software developers and decision makers, while everyone was supposedly on the same side.
It will take similar amount of years to go back into the cold war heterogeneous computing landscape of the 60, early 90s.
This assuming there would be an willingness across all European countries to actually push for that, and not jump out when it gets too hard and search for compromises instead.
This is why most sovereignty initiatives focus mostly on SaaS products and hardly on actual computing devices.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#26Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there
They're fine for a CDN but overall their offering surprisingly immature IME. The devx for their hosted scripts/database just isn't there, and e.g. they only allow one global API key with full permissions, etc.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#27Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there
They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up. I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.
big corps = big money. they dont make money from your $5/mth static site, its practically free when you're at CF scale
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#28> The front door is not the whole stack Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN? On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to…
> now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website ... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires…
What you're paying for is business continuity, not for them to host your site. I know you can host the site itself on much cheaper infrastructure.
Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#29Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
#30Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?
It depends on what you're trying to serve, but it's used to either save you money or as an insurance (or both). You don't need a CDN overall. But if you grow large enough, at some point you'll run into one of these three situations:
- Your public traffic costs you so much to repeatedly process that it's cheaper to let some service cache the common responses instead. (Where the cache size is larger than anything you'd want to support yourself. For example, if it's - Your customers on the other side of the world start complaining that the resources take ages to load.
- Someone floods you with enough traffic that you can't respond to real customers traffic anymore. You get a ransom email to pay them to stop. But there are enough groups doing that that paying is useless because someone else will try again in a few days. If you're providing a service where people pay you to use the website, you're losing money until you solve this problem.