11–20 of 68 posts
There's only one step required by the customer which is to point their DNS to Clearalias, no API calls or extra set up by the app or the customers.
Interesting product - fly.io It’s essentially a reverse proxy as a service. Sort of like Cloudflare but with what looks like a nicer API, and custom domain name SSL eg. for multi tenant apps. It was a bit pricy when I plugged in how many requests we get per month on our servers, easily in 5-figure per month. Having said that, internally we built most of their selling points already.
Interesting product - fly.io It’s essentially a reverse proxy as a service. Sort of like Cloudflare but with what looks like a nicer API, and custom domain name SSL eg. for multi tenant apps. It was a bit pricy when I plugged in how many requests we get per month on our servers, easily in 5-figure per month. Having said that, internally we built most of their selling points already.
There are a bunch of companies who've done most of what we've exposed in house (us included in past lives!), once we're a bit older and more fully developed I think we'll have compelling features even for you though! We do have deep volume discounts, fwiw, so if you get tired of running all that stuff let us know. :)
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Why would you need to send them away twice for DNS changes?!
I'm assuming mrkurt meant that you send your users once to create a dns record (in case you haven't already) - you can add any hostname you want on Fly, it doesn't have to exist, yet. Then you go and create a DNS challenge for Let's Encrypt. Obviously, these 2 steps are orthogonal, but this is the reality of user onboarding.
Clearalias.com is another service that provides SSL multi-tenant apps and SaaSes that want to provide secured custom domains for their customers. There's only one step required by the customer which is to point their DNS to Clearalias, no API calls or extra set up by the app or the customers.
The API is mainly for people who'd like to automate the process, because they want to provide custom domains for their customers (so more for B2B use-cases) ;)
Interesting product - fly.io It’s essentially a reverse proxy as a service. Sort of like Cloudflare but with what looks like a nicer API, and custom domain name SSL eg. for multi tenant apps. It was a bit pricy when I plugged in how many requests we get per month on our servers, easily in 5-figure per month. Having said that, internally we built most of their selling points already.
I agree with the pricy bit. I've made a calculation, and it would cost me 1200$ a month to run what Cloudflare does for free. Now, I get that free is not an option. 50/100$ a month is probably OK. But that's beyond reasonable. And prices change depending on where people visit you from (!?)
It's really expensive to do that on top of CloudFlare, and most apps like that aren't using a tremendous amount of bandwidth.
We're not _yet_ a great option as a general purpose CDN replacement (both pricing and featureset) but we're getting there, and are pushing prices down continuously. It's more expensive to buy bandwidth and power in certain cities, too, hence the different pricing per region.
If you're willing, I'd love to know what your traffic breakdown is and how you got to that $1200/mo number. You can email me if you'd like! (kurt.mackey@fly.io)
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I'm assuming mrkurt meant that you send your users once to create a dns record (in case you haven't already) - you can add any hostname you want on Fly, it doesn't have to exist, yet. Then you go and create a DNS challenge for Let's Encrypt. Obviously, these 2 steps are orthogonal, but this is the reality of user onboarding.
But why would that need to be in two steps?
Since we control the http response once DNS changes, we don't have that problem. And it's simpler for people to create CNAME/ALIAS records.
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DNS challenges weren't broken, they technically worked just fine. But they added an additional step to our setup process, and we were losing customers during signup because of it. We can still do the DNS challenge it's just not how we guide people through our setup. Basically with the DNS challenge, we had to send people away to make DNS changes, have them come back and confirm they were approved, and then we sent th…
Why would you need to send them away twice for DNS changes?!
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But why would that need to be in two steps?
Well, it's two DNS entries. You could do them both at the same time, but people were getting that TXT record wrong pretty frequently, which would have meant https connections getting an invalid certificate had they changed their actual hostname at the same time. Since we control the http response once DNS changes, we don't have that problem. And it's simpler for people to create CNAME/ALIAS records.
Why not have them create a DNAME, a delegation, or just two CNAMEs?
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Well, it's two DNS entries. You could do them both at the same time, but people were getting that TXT record wrong pretty frequently, which would have meant https connections getting an invalid certificate had they changed their actual hostname at the same time. Since we control the http response once DNS changes, we don't have that problem. And it's simpler for people to create CNAME/ALIAS records.
Erm ... you had people create TXT records? Why would you do that? Wouldn't people then have to manually update the TXT record on each certificate renew?! Why not have them create a DNAME, a delegation, or just two CNAMEs?
The http-01 challenge is simpler, we can get people setup with one CNAME/A-record.
Once we're serving traffic, we can do all renewals with an http challenge and they don't need to change DNS ever again.