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Finding the right CDN for our startup

robin.userapp.io

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Re: Finding the right CDN for our startup

#21

Post by slowdown »

Prospective Rackspace customers - Avoid the cloudfiles offering from Rackspace at all costs. Their support is good, but we used to average out atleast one user who were getting access denied to store their files on Cloudfiles (We're kind of a file upload service in the most basic context). Switching in progress (to S3) and so far so good. I guess you get what you pay for, after all.

Re: Finding the right CDN for our startup

#23

Post by randomhunt »

asb wrote: post #19
randomhunt wrote: post #16

Please don't go to Cloudfront, it's truly horrendous (wearing my end user hat) to see so many sites have problems and timeouts because of them. For example Ninite.com moved to them and now the site is virtually unusable because of it, over 90% of the time I get a "403: Forbidden" error when trying to do anything...like send them feedback on how the website doesn't work... I even see more HN problems this week and I'm…

Do you mean CloudFlare rather than CloudFront?

Perhaps re: HN, and if so I apologise for confusion, but for Ninite it's CouldFront (d3doxs0mwx271h.cloudfront.net).

I spent a short while investigating if there was an easy way to get it working but ended up just giving up on the site.

Re: Finding the right CDN for our startup

#24

Post by timothy89 »

babuskov wrote: post #12
typerandom wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we could use CloudFront. Unfortunately they charge a bit for custom SSL ($600/zone/mo). Not that fun for a startup. Are you also using that? /R

I don't understand this. You have so much traffic that you need CloudFront, but cannot earn enough to spare $600/mo? What kind of startup is it? From what I could tell talking with some people so far, is that they only think they need CDN, while a couple of regular dedicated servers would be just fine. But, then again, most of my customers are in Europe so I can serve files cheaply. In US, I'm currently using FDCServ…

The reason we're using a CDN is not because of the traffic - that would be easily solved with an AWS server and a lightweight http server such as nginx. We decided to go with a CDN because of two reasons:

1) The website and web app should load fast all over the world. Not only in the US or Sweden (where we live).

2) We don't want to host or put any time into hosting or own website and static files. We rather pay a little extra to don't have to think of that ever again ;)

Re: Finding the right CDN for our startup

#25

Post by moot »

I've been extremely happy with CloudFlare. 4chan probably wouldn't be around today without them. CF has helped us by mitigating every DDoS since we started with them two years ago, and have kept operating costs in check by offering flat pricing. Even at their highest tier (Enterprise), we're saving money versus what we'd be spending with our colo.

Re: Finding the right CDN for our startup

#28

Post by kalleboo »

Are the high SSL costs because they need a dedicated IP per domain at each of their POPs?

Would it be possible for them to offer an SNI-only SSL option for far cheaper if you know beforehand who your clients are (say, if you're hosting content for an iOS app)?

Re: Finding the right CDN for our startup

#29

Post by alecsmart1 »

We were using Amazon CloudFront and bleeding money. Approximately spending about $50 every 2 days. I researched to find a cheaper alternative. And found cdn77.com. Very good and reliable. The costs came down to approx $100/mo. I am not sure about custom SSL pricing though.
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