Finding the right CDN for our startup • Hacker News Board

Re: Finding the right CDN for our startup

#61

Post by neilk » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 11:36 PM UTC

twistedpair wrote: post #38

cmer wrote: post #11

We switched from Cloudfront to Fastly and couldn't be happier. These guys are awesome and the product is top notch. I highly recommend Fastly. We weren't too impressed with Cloudfront. The performance was all over the place and they provide no insight for cache hits/misses.

On price Fastly has copied every CloudFront price to the cent. I seems they differentiate on statistics and rapid purging (their purported competitive edge). However, for most any application, with proper version naming of resources, purges should not be an issue, unless you've got hard coded references to those resources.

The rapid purge is probably inspired by the requirements for a large, popular wiki. The Fastly team comes from Wikia.

When the entire page is static, but changes must be communicated everywhere instantly, rapid purging is the answer.

Re: Finding the right CDN for our startup

#62

Post by Erwin » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 12:03 AM UTC

noelwelsh wrote: post #5

We use MaxCDN. It seems to work well, but I find all CDNs fairly opaque. How can I actually measure latency? I can't with web browsers being the way they are, so I really have no way of knowing. (There is http://www.w3.org/TR/navigation-timing/ but it is very limited, and not suitable for us.) Clarification psated from a comment I made below: Sure, I can test my latency, but I'm more interested in what my customers a…

Google has this thing which lets you essentially choose a location (and browser) and run a test with output from the page speed addon: http://www.webpagetest.org/

I'm using Cloudfront with the origin option for a subset of our users. I've found a few clients with so restrictive or broken firewall rules that I had to add an option to default to getting the files from the source if users come from network X or Y. While cloudfront lets you download the log files, you get one S3 object per edge location per 15 minutes or something like that, so 1000s per day, which made things difficult to troubleshoot (I suspect the problem with one user was partial cache due to Apache's deflate sending responses as chunked encoding as default and Amazon's origin spider sometime dropping such connections).

Re: Finding the right CDN for our startup

#63

Post by slowdown » Sat, Nov 09, 2013, 3:47 AM UTC

groks wrote: post #56

slowdown wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes they don't resolve properly too. And for vide, it's worse, they don't set the Mime type sometimes, which is quite irritating, for example say Mp4, because the video tag needs this to be set for it to work consistently :(

They don't set the mime-type on upload, or you set the mime-type on upload and they fail to set it when you download it via the Akami CDN? I was planning to use Cloud Files and it's CDN. Thanks for sharing.

Their docs say they do it automatically, but for me sometimes they don't, which sucks and breaks my video player (flowplayer) on my sites. :(