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Sorry, I realize I overdid it on the affiliate links so I've called out the link and removed some others. Just thought it was nice that they had an affiliate program. Nothing shady intended!

Yeah IANAL, but this sort of endorsement with undisclosed remuneration would probably run afoul of FTC guidelines, which is why you see disclaimers like "As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases" everywhere. The author seems to live in the UK, but a cursory search suggests there's something similar there as well.

>I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".

You can just move to another provider at that point. At least when it comes to CDN and DNS there’s literally no vendor lock-in.

You can grab your dns records export them to csv and import somewhere else easily and a CDN is just a file server so you can just give your files to someone else easily.

A change from $2 to $3 is as likely as change from $2 to "call us for quote"

> I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now". > I'd rather have a low fee now, a change from $2 to $3 is more likely and that's fine for me. But from free to not free is risky for me.

With free offerings, you’re always helping the supplier in some way. Then you become the product. Which makes it difficult to understand the value exchange; it’s much easier to do so when you’re just paying a fair sum of money.

Logically, the only thing CloudFlare would do is lower or eliminate the free usage tier. For instance, if X million operations are currently free, they make X/2 operations free. I don't think they would do that, but if they did, it couldn't possibly be existential to any viable company.

Practically, any metered supplier can put you out of business. It usually doesn't happen because destruction is mutually assured.

+1 for using smaller, more independent companies in any case!

Well said. I use bunny.net for many of the same reasons, and to support diversity of solutions in the internet ecosystem.

>What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".

This logic doesn't hold much water, however. Abrupt changes in pricing or other conditions happen with paid tiers as well

If you have the money it’s good

If the rest of the market moved to $20, why would economics of another vendor moving from $2 to $3 at the same time be plausible?

Cloudflare's biggest benefit is the wrangler cli which when paired with claude code means that you can completely handoff setup/debugging/analysis.

Some of you may be skeptical about this but it allows for much easier management when working on multiple SaaS/hobby projects/personal tools.

Bunny has a lot of that (they have a sqlite compatible API, edge functions, but the call it something different, etc.)

That being said, I had enough issues with Bunny and CF debugging across regions that I made this free tool to do both remote HTTP and TCP traceroutes to keep my sanity: https://dnsisbeautiful.com/global-http-availability

This is why we purge cache from CI after a deploy[0], and other places when our users publish a story, etc.

That said, the edge-caching being how it is, it's possible to run into some race-conditions where the cache has been purged but not propagated to the edge network, and if visited too soon, the stale version might end up back into the cache.

[0]:

  curl --fail --output "/dev/null" --silent --show-error -X POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/{our_zone_id}/purge_cache" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLOUDFLARE_CACHE_PURGE_API_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    --data '{"hosts": ["instorier.com", "www.instorier.com"]}'

Yeah ran into that too, and found someone else that wrote a script for it, so we're not alone: https://bash.cyberciti.biz/web-server/linuxunix-bash-shell-s...

Bunny doesn’t have a free tier, but their greatest asset is that it has prepaid billing: there’s zero risk of running up a surprise six figure bill just because of being attacked, making a mistake with a deploy, or other sudden sources of resource usage. I’d rather my site go down than to be on the hook for hundreds of thousands, which many projects have no hope of generating from sudden spikes in traffic of any source.

There’s a cost limit to how much high availability is worth on any project but vendors like CloudFlare don’t respect that.

DB seems like the main shortcoming in the stack for them. I don't want to deal with the limitations of D1. Seems like a serverless postgres setup a la Neon/Supabase would be a slam dunk.

AFAIC, WinterTC doesn't specify how to start an HTTP server. Their minimum common API requires, among other things, that the Request and Response interfaces from the fetch specification are present. Unfortunately, it does not specify any sort of serve function.

FWIW, Cloudflare's edge platform is pretty proprietary too.

Yes, Magic Containers is excellent. I don't know if it scales up to huge loads well -- that might be expensive -- but it scales down really well. For a very lightly loaded hobby project it's almost free.

A few people here are complaining about the lack of a free tier, but Magic Containers can cover a lot of the same ground as Cloudflare's Durable Objects, which IIRC cost a minimum of $5/month.

Are cold starts an issue?

It's not, but I can see how it came across like that. I just wrote up my experience moving over, and I thought it was nice they had an affiliate link. I've cleaned it up and called out the affiliate link. Nothing shady intended.

> (single point of failure to... another single point of failure)

I feel like you missed what the author meant with that phrase. The author wasn't talking about for their website, but the internet as a whole.

> I can’t help but feel that the idea of centralizing the internet into a single US corporation feels off.

The point of picking Bunny.net is that it's alternative to this single entity that's got so much of the internet running through it, and is less susceptible to the BS in the US.

Yeah. I flagged this thread for spam.

That's interesting, we moved to Cloudflare R2 for our CDN solution, and we got reports from some european government institutions that our assets weren't loading, likely for similar reasons as you mention, so we rolled back whilst looking for options.

The solution was to move to Bunny, and that worked for everyone.

Other commenters laughing at you for the price... It's not about the price it's about the barrier. Even if I love a service, I won't get very many people to try it if they need to enter a credit card.

oh no a euro a month for a service. How will we financially recover?

The absence of free offering is not a bug in this case, it's a feature.

> Unfortunately it doesn't offer free hosting for hobbyists. Even for superficial traffic you'll have pay 1 euro a month (plus VAT).

?

So 1 euro a month is too expensive for you? Wow.

Just pay the 1 Euro or go to GitHub where that is free but goes down almost every week.

Man, come on now, it's 1.20 EUR a month.

Much of the point of a CDN is that they can cache responses, and likely also make other changes. I don't see how that could be done without seeing what's inside the request.

Probably not. That’d look a lot like a bunch of load balancers around the world hitting your own backend. There’s generally not a way to cache web data without decrypting it inside the cache.

Why would you want a content delivery network for uncachable content? Literally the point of CDN is to cache content and deliver it.

Granted cloudflare also does DDOS protection, and that makes sense for an API. For that you could do some DDOS protection without stripping TLS, but it can only protect against volumetric attacks like syn/ack floods and not against attacks that are establishing full TCP connections and overwhelming the app server. (rate limiting incoming connections can go a long way, but depending on details, it might still be enough to overwhelm the serving resources, your use case is up to you to understand).

I had not heard of the "La Liga situation", but googled and what I learned was that La Liga is a Spanish football (soccer) team, and their players did a protest action about not wanting a match to be staged in Florida, and the team owners tried to say it was an illegal strike, but a court recently disagreed and said it was protected protest....

I still have no idea what any of this has to do with any clients moving from Cloudflare to Bunny.net, what am I missing?

heh one bad report gets action. years as a paying customer get you silence. ugly asymmetry.

They do support IPv6 but not in every POP, unless something changed.

I have IPv6-only backends and I had to select serving from the main POPs rather than the entire network (which is fine by me as they are also cheaper).

How did you determine that Bunny lacks IPv6?

The CDN certainly has it: https://bunny.net/blog/ipv6-returns-to-bunnycdn/

Depending on where I query from, OP's blog does have it as well:

    # host jola.dev
    jola.dev has address 37.19.207.38
    jola.dev has IPv6 address 2400:52e0:1a04::1310:1

I've tested just about every DNS provider I could find. Self-hosting and Bunny aside, my needs are especially well met by CloudDNS and LuaDNS.

https://www.cloudns.net/premium/

https://www.luadns.com/pricing.html

I've found every other offering to be lacking. Some examples: Cloudflare is alright but has settings footguns if you're not used to Their Way of Doing It™ (e.g., before using DNSControl, I had to manually flip switches to turn off proxying every time I updated my zones). deSEC is free and okay, but sometimes quite slow to propagate and its UI+API are unwieldy. DNS Made Easy is often pushed on social media, but it's ridiculously pricey for what you get if you don't need a SLA. DNSimple seemed nice but IIRC I couldn't get a different API token per zone (?).

I'm currently relying mainly on LuaDNS. For me, it functions as a "dumb" DNS host (i.e., not using their Lua configuration-as-code system). Their API is oddly designed, but it's been passable since a recent-ish update, which has allowed me to safely port my zone files to DNSControl.

https://dnscontrol.org

I should add a friend has recommended DNsimple.com and I’ve previously found their service to be excellent.

https://dnsimple.com/

50 cents per domain per month 10 cents per million queries

That’s prob cheap enough to support lots of little hobby sites and bigger traffic sites likely have some budget.

I make a point of using a dedicated service provider for each distinct service. YMMV but I'm happy with DNSMadeEasy (DNS), IWantMyName (registrar) and Fastmail (email).

Try desec.io, I use them and am very happy. Free DNSSEC, which some other DNS hosters want to charge you for (IONOS, looking at you).

You can use Bunny for DNS-only, it works well

Surely by definition, being pro-EU is automatically anti-nationalism (at least for everyone inside the EU)?

I am pro-EU and anti-nationalist. This works because the EU is a collection of states.

It would be super nice to have a setup that uses multiple CDNs w/ automatic failover.

Doable, but that removes all the free tiers of all the CDN's. AFAIK they all require an enterprise account to keep using ones own DNS and their own GSLB DNS failover. There are probably a few exceptions and one could maybe make something of that but I don't know which ones are the exceptions.

Also had a severe issue with Bunny, serving videos. They had a cache poisoning issue where they served a few frames from pornographic videos right in the middle of our educational videos. They did not have the multi-tenancy thing fully figured out, and it became a nightmare scenario. After that, we moved to a provider that explicitly did not allow porn.