
Ask HN: Cloudflare CDN Alternatives? - 02020202
Are there alternatives to cloudflare&#x27;s CDN model that uses caching and ssl on DNS level?
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PaulHoule
I have been using AMZN Cloudfront, mostly because I was in AMZN already. Azure
has a similar "service" with the difference that you can choose one of several
CDN services -- which lowers the appeal to me a lot. On one hand I can't
imagine I'm not being played by a Verizon CDN, but the mental effort to choose
a CDN is almost certainly more than the benefit one could get from switching.)

Alternately, I'm not convinced that CDNs are not a scam.

Basically, it bends plausibility that a system with N+1 parts is really more
reliable than a system with N parts. One more part is another part to fail and
you can only come out ahead if you do everything right in the system design.

If you host your site in (say) us-east-1 and somebody wants to access your
site via https from somewhere in Africa, it will work, but there will be some
extra latency.

With pipelining you will be able to hide many of the round trips.

A CDN is going to have to copy the content to Africa before it can serve it to
the viewer and if they haven't viewed it before the cache is only going to add
to the time it takes to serve the content (first it has to determine it
doesn't have the content, determine which parts of the Rube Goldberg machine
are going to get it for you, get the content, serve the content.)

The CDN industry has convinced people that they "need" a CDN because "everyone
else" uses a CDN. They never show full-system performance results, and if they
did and they didn't like the answers they could always change a few parameters
(didn't work well in Uganda? look, we got down from 20s in Nigeria to 19.2 s!)
or blame you for doing something wrong on your site. (Pro tip: many web sites
use 90% or more bandwidth for advertising, trackers, and other bloat... remove
those and viewing your web site is like being hit by a bullet!)

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dougbarrett
There are a ton, ones I've used personally are:

[https://fastly.com](https://fastly.com)

[https://www.stackpath.com](https://www.stackpath.com)

[https://www.keycdn.com](https://www.keycdn.com)

along with the AWS offering

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stevekemp
"ssl on DNS level" \- What do you mean by that?

DNS and SSL (TLS) are very different things.

~~~
sitkack
DNSSEC?

