Re:Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
by stephenr on Thursday February 16, 2023 @06:57AM
(#34817581)
It will depend on your use case.
For an average site, that just wants basic CDN facilities (cache assets; maybe do some rule processing to control cache of "dynamic" pages etc) there are dozens.
The issue comes in a few of the niche uses.
A client of mine has been using CF for the public site for several years, but until recently used S3 + Cloudfront for content that users download (essentially purchased digital files). That content is now also served via Cloudflare, using tokens (similar to pre-signed URLs for Cloudfront, so the cache can validate that a user should have access to a file).
CF don't cache all the downloadable content (anything over 512MB is excluded from caching unless you pay for Enterpri$e level plan) but they also don't have per-{m,g,t}byte transfer pricing either.
This is obviously not a problem for a lot of use-cases, but for anyone offering downloadable content, or large volumes of network traffic, it's going to be hard to find a CDN that can compete on price with Cloudflare.
For an average site, that just wants basic CDN facilities (cache assets; maybe do some rule processing to control cache of "dynamic" pages etc) there are dozens.
The issue comes in a few of the niche uses.
A client of mine has been using CF for the public site for several years, but until recently used S3 + Cloudfront for content that users download (essentially purchased digital files). That content is now also served via Cloudflare, using tokens (similar to pre-signed URLs for Cloudfront, so the cache can validate that a user should have access to a file).
CF don't cache all the downloadable content (anything over 512MB is excluded from caching unless you pay for Enterpri$e level plan) but they also don't have per-{m,g,t}byte transfer pricing either.
This is obviously not a problem for a lot of use-cases, but for anyone offering downloadable content, or large volumes of network traffic, it's going to be hard to find a CDN that can compete on price with Cloudflare.