Re:Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour
by michaelmior on Sunday July 27, 2014 @08:33PM
(#8094502)
Maybe it can work. I'm still a little skeptical. But I don't see why you would ever want to deal with managing all this infrastructure yourself when there are many established providers that can likely do a much better job at a comparable price.
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Managing the infrastructure is definitely where it falls short, but if you can get it done quickly it can be very cost-efficient for smaller projects. Three $5 DO boxes can easily handle > 1TB per month, which will cost over $100 on most CDNs.
Couldn't you just use cloudflare's free tier?
CloudFlare's hit rate is predictably terrible for large binary files. We actually use DigitalOcean + Varnish + S3 for serving downloads from mods.io, since the files are relatively big and the site has such a low margin. Traditional CDNs (we were using Fastly) are not scalable cost-wise for that particular site.
Managing the infrastructures is quite easy with Ansible, Puppet, or whatever your flavor of config management is. You can also take advantage of anycast DNS and GEO targeting by signing up for a free NSOne.net account. That would probably shave $5 off the total.