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Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

scalescale.com

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Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#11
I'm more than a little bit concerned that the article doesn't point out the serious risk of running a single DNS server for the records.

I get that they're trying to keep things simple for their demo, but unsuspecting folks following this guide are in for quite a shock when their GeoDNS is taken out by a single physical server fault.

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it can work. I'm still a little skeptical. But I don't see why you would ever want to deal with managing all this infrastructure yourself when there are many established providers that can likely do a much better job at a comparable price.

Managing the infrastructure is definitely where it falls short, but if you can get it done quickly it can be very cost-efficient for smaller projects. Three $5 DO boxes can easily handle > 1TB per month, which will cost over $100 on most CDNs.

Couldn't you just use cloudflare's free tier?

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#14
post #5

Thanks for sharing. Note that there's a typo in the link to Ewan's github profile (should start with https, not ttps).

thanks. will get it fixed shortly. this wasn't really scheduled for prime time but started taking off. appreciate the feedback!

"This wasn't really scheduled for prime time, but started taking off"

:) You submitted the link to HN and that comment makes it seem like the post accidentally took off!

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#15
post #7
post #2

rolling your CDN on VPS instances isn't exactly cost-effective, and is probably more of an exercise for fun than anything else. Unless you need features out of your CDN that you can't get from existing CDN providers, I don't really see the point. also kind of unusual that this blog post is by the president of MaxCDN.

Actually, with DigitalOcean, you get quite a lot of bandwidth for the price. Additionally, their transfer limits are high (1TB for the $5 instances), and overage is only $0.02/GB. If you combine this with something like Route 53's anycast latency-routed DNS, it can work very well.

If you have realtively low usage, Amazon CloudFront is already pretty cheap.

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#16
post #11

I'm more than a little bit concerned that the article doesn't point out the serious risk of running a single DNS server for the records. I get that they're trying to keep things simple for their demo, but unsuspecting folks following this guide are in for quite a shock when their GeoDNS is taken out by a single physical server fault.

Good point - it seemed obvious. We'll cover different options for that in a future blog post.

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#17
post #12

Cool article for understanding the basics of a CDN. What sort of page load improvement can one get by adding geographically distributed servers?

it can be quite a lot. you can test using a CDN or a setup like this and the tools over at www.webpagetest.org (from Patrick Meehan - who is awesome) from different locations.

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#18
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks. will get it fixed shortly. this wasn't really scheduled for prime time but started taking off. appreciate the feedback!

"This wasn't really scheduled for prime time, but started taking off" :) You submitted the link to HN and that comment makes it seem like the post accidentally took off!

itchy trigger finger :-) didn't expect people to respond so well on a Sunday.

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#19
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managing the infrastructure is definitely where it falls short, but if you can get it done quickly it can be very cost-efficient for smaller projects. Three $5 DO boxes can easily handle > 1TB per month, which will cost over $100 on most CDNs.

Couldn't you just use cloudflare's free tier?

CloudFlare's hit rate is predictably terrible for large binary files. We actually use DigitalOcean + Varnish + S3 for serving downloads from mods.io, since the files are relatively big and the site has such a low margin. Traditional CDNs (we were using Fastly) are not scalable cost-wise for that particular site.
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