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Fastly S-1

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Re: Fastly S-1

#61

Post by boulos »

tyingq wrote: post #17
firebird84 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may be distinguishing them based on their type of customer, rather than their quantity of traffic. Other CDNs may tend to exclusively pursue much larger customers like big banks, governments, etc., while Cloudflare from my understanding is quite happy to serve the smaller market segment.

Ahh, yes, I read it as "small, business-focused CDN" though there's no comma there. You're right..they meant focused on "small business." I suppose the dash threw me off.

Fascinating, that’s because they did the dash wrong for the compound adjective.

It should have been the ugly but correct “small-business-focused CDN”. If they didn’t want to double hyphenate then “small-business focused” would have been read properly by everyone. But you definitely parsed their “small[,] business-focused” correctly :).

Re: Fastly S-1

#62

Post by lkbm »

maybeiambatman wrote: post #46
SteveNuts wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if Amazon hasn't kicked a competitor like Netflix off of their platform, Fastly has little to worry about.

That's probably not the right analogy. Kicking someone off of your platform isn't the same as using your own platform instead of a competitors. I'm sure Azure would welcome competitors to use their product - same way AWS welcomes Netflix. A good analogy would be Amazon switching from Oracle to AWS based solutions. In which case, they do have something to worry about.

With regard to their "what if all the cloud providers block us" issue, it's is a good indication that they're fine. (Page 30 "We rely on third-party hosting providers that may be difficult to replace.") I don't think that's a serious risk.

For the Github thing, you're right, it's a different situation.

Re: Fastly S-1

#63

Post by nyc_pizzadev »

lkbm wrote: post #36
burger_moon wrote: post #24

Interesting that just 10 customers make up over a third of revenue for them.

Judging from pages 4-5, I'm guessing these include NYT, New Relic, Ticketmaster, Alaska Airlines, Spotify, and Github. They mention other cloud platforms as competition, and Azure has a CDN. I doubt Github would switch anytime in the near future, but the dangers posed to smaller companies by the consolidation under giants is interesting. What happens when your competitor doesn't just try to steal your clients, but ca…

Those accounts aren't the big fish. Well, github possibly is. Websites are tiny, especially when your revenue is based per byte. The money is in video and downloads. Getting a fraction of Apple's or Microsoft's CDN spend for downloads is probably worth tens of millions.

Re: Fastly S-1

#64

Post by dubcanada »

sjwright wrote: post #58
tylermenezes wrote: post #52

As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.) Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switch…

I find it difficult to believe that sales would be affected by a latency drop less than one tenth of a second. How did you isolate the variables?

I am going to assume there is more to it then that. Even Amazon only says 100ms increments affect sales.

Re: Fastly S-1

#65

Post by bufferoverflow »

tylermenezes wrote: post #52

As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.) Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switch…

I highly doubt your claims about Cloudflare being an order of magnitude slower, they are consistently one of the fastest CDNs:

https://www.cdnperf.com/

Top 15:

    1 Google Cloud CDN        36.70 ms 
    2 jsDelivr CDN            36.80 ms 
    3 Akamai CDN              38.00 ms 
    4 Verizon (Edgecast) CDN  38.30 ms 
    5 Azure CDN               38.50 ms 
    6 Fastly CDN              41.38 ms 
    7 Cloudflare CDN          41.80 ms 
    8 AWS CloudFront CDN      43.00 ms 
    9 CacheFly                43.90 ms 
    10 BunnyCDN               46.00 ms 
    11 StackPath CDN          46.53 ms 
    12 KeyCDN                 47.00 ms 
    13 CDN.NET                48.46 ms 
    14 G-Core Labs CDN        48.74 ms 
    15 Quantil CDN            50.20 ms

Re: Fastly S-1

#66

Post by [deleted] »

tylermenezes wrote: post #52

As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.) Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switch…

[deleted]

Re: Fastly S-1

#67

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #65
tylermenezes wrote: post #52

As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.) Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switch…

I highly doubt your claims about Cloudflare being an order of magnitude slower, they are consistently one of the fastest CDNs: https://www.cdnperf.com/ Top 15: 1 Google Cloud CDN 36.70 ms 2 jsDelivr CDN 36.80 ms 3 Akamai CDN 38.00 ms 4 Verizon (Edgecast) CDN 38.30 ms 5 Azure CDN 38.50 ms 6 Fastly CDN 41.38 ms 7 Cloudflare CDN 41.80 ms 8 AWS CloudFront CDN 43.00 ms 9 CacheFly 43.90 ms 10 BunnyCDN 46.00 ms 11 StackPath…

Everything about what the top comment said seems like Fastly marketing propaganda.

7% increase in sales? With what sample size? With what confidence? How did you isolate variables?

For reference, I work at a company with $110M in annual sales. We were planning to start using Fastly. For obvious reasons, we wanted to know how much of a net positive that would be for the business. So we wanted to A/B test it. For us, at least, it's not as straight forward as it would seem.

Re: Fastly S-1

#68

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

celestialcheese wrote: post #31

From 2017 to 2018, they added 147 new paying customers. Of which, 57 were enterprise and based on their metrics claiming > 80% of revenue was from these "enterprise" deals, probably high dollar. Still, ~$50m in marketing/advertising spend to earn 147 new paying customers (340k/customer) seems high to my untrained eye. Do those enterprise deals and that "132% Dollar Expansion Rate" justify such high CPA? Those with ex…

Wait. What? 147 paying customers? I was personally one of those customers, paying like $100 a month, mostly just as a test. They really only added 147 paying customers? How many of them were just paying $100 a month for the base price?

Re: Fastly S-1

#69

Post by cagenut »

tedk-42 wrote: post #42

/* Work for a Media Company */ We're looking to move one of our sites off Akamai mostly for costs reasons. Fastly configuration in Varnish VCL - Senior Engineers from my company highly rate Varnish as a cache software so Fastly was an easy choice. I believe Akamai have been our CDN from the start. The amount of reconfiguration we'd need to do to get everything off would create a huge number of tickets in our work que…

Fastly has 4 PoPs in Australia and two in New Zealand, you can see their reach in the map on their site: https://www.fastly.com/network-map

Also, if you're a big enough deal (thousands/month+) you'd be surprised how much of that config re-write the fastly sales engineers can help you with.

Re: Fastly S-1

#70

Post by foobarbazetc »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #65
tylermenezes wrote: post #52

As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.) Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switch…

I highly doubt your claims about Cloudflare being an order of magnitude slower, they are consistently one of the fastest CDNs: https://www.cdnperf.com/ Top 15: 1 Google Cloud CDN 36.70 ms 2 jsDelivr CDN 36.80 ms 3 Akamai CDN 38.00 ms 4 Verizon (Edgecast) CDN 38.30 ms 5 Azure CDN 38.50 ms 6 Fastly CDN 41.38 ms 7 Cloudflare CDN 41.80 ms 8 AWS CloudFront CDN 43.00 ms 9 CacheFly 43.90 ms 10 BunnyCDN 46.00 ms 11 StackPath…

CDNPerf is an okay way to get an overview, but not a great way to actually compare CDNs.

That said, it’s not 10x or whatever. Maybe like 5-10% depending on location.

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