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by alynn 2076 days ago
I wasn't aware that CDNs were much cheaper, and am genuinely curious what service you are using at what prices.

When I look at AWS pricing, us-east-1 at < 10TB, I see: EC2 data transfer out to the internet is 9¢/GB, and Cloudfront is 8.5¢/GB for the lowest price class. That's a slight savings, but at 6% I can't justify the effort to switch over on cost alone.

Should I be looking at a different CDN service?

2 comments

Cloudflare famously charges $0/GB, with some arbitrary restrictions on the way you use their service, and I’ve heard rumors of soft limits on the total amount of bandwidth you can use before they email you to upgrade to a higher plan.

I’ve never used BunnyCDN, but they charge a flat $0.01/GB for North American traffic, and I’ve heard some good things about them.

DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, and some other cloud providers charge $0.01/GB without a CDN, just using their regular servers, but obviously a CDN is more than just a way to save money — it’s a way to lower latency and improve user experience.

The mega clouds (AWS, Azure, and GCP) seem to significantly over-charge for egress bandwidth as a nice profit mechanism, just because they can.

My unpopular opinion is that mega clouds are overrated. They’re fine, but they have a lot of weird gotchas that most people have just accepted as “how the cloud works.”

Vercel is free.