5 ms·

Show HN: A detailed CDN pricing calculator

22 points by jimaek 8y ago

bubaflub 8y ago
Why isn’t Cloudflare listed? They don’t charge for bandwidth so I suppose they’d always be the cheapest.
- jimaek 8y ago
  That's the reason they are not listed :) They don't have a clear pricing like the other CDNs. They have internal limits and overages for bandwidth but its not public.
  - jgrahamc 8y ago
    That's not true. We do not have overages. We don't charge for bandwidth. If you use a lot of bandwidth then we may contact you and see if paying for service makes more sense for you (for example, if you are running a business on our free plan then the level of support you get might not be what you need; or there may be missing features that would help you).
    - jimaek 8y ago
      A close friend of mine also got multiple emails from sales telling that he is using too much bandwidth on the Pro plan and asking to upgrade to $2000/month+ or "else". But they were not able to define what would happen otherwise. Now I guess its just a scare tactic?
      - jgrahamc 8y ago
        I'd like to see those emails. Can you get them and forward them to me? There should not be any "else" in those mails.
    - milankragujevic 8y ago
      Are you sure on the "we do not have overages"? Could I have 100TB of monthly traffic all served by your edge nodes (force cache everything + long expiry + files split into chunks) of legal content (firmware files for embedded devices) and not get kicked off?
      - eastdakota 8y ago
        Yes.
- foobarbazetc 8y ago
  If you use a lot of bandwidth a CF sales person contacts you and tells you it’s time to pay. And it’s not cheap. More expensive than Fastly in our case (though we went with Google CDN and saved a bunch of money and got better performance).
  - ericpauley 8y ago
    Any idea where this limit is? 1TB? 10? 100?
    - chocolatkey 8y ago
      I run a site in cloudflare that's using a little over 2TB/mo (used to be more), and haven't received any email. Would be nice to know what this limit is so we're ready when the time comes
  - jgrahamc 8y ago
    I'd love to know what site that was (jgc @ cloudflare . com) so that I can understand why we couldn't offer you a good deal. Also, we don't force people to pay. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17639316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17639316
  - eastdakota 8y ago
    This is not correct. While we’ll reach out heavy users to see if they’d like to upgrade to get all the benefits of our Enterprise accounts, if you don’t want to upgrade you can continue to use our base plans. If you ever hear otherwise from a person on our Sales team, please let me know directly because they are wrong and in violation of our explicit policies. My email: matthewatcloudflaredotcom.
    - reitzensteinm 8y ago
      This story plays out on HN like clockwork 1) Person A recommends CloudFlare as a CDN because it's really cheap 2) Person B warns that the were using CF in this manner and had their account closed 3) CF rep comes in to clarify that no such policy exists
- huangbong 8y ago
  Cloudflare has a file size limit (512MB) and only caches certain file extensions so for things like binary files, installers, and video it will not cache. For the HTML/CSS/JS asset use case it’s perfectly fine though.
- helb 8y ago
  I run a local news site with ~ 1.3 TB/month traffic on two cheap VPSs and a free Cloudflare account (paying just for a non-shared SSL certificate, $5 per month). It saves us about 95 % of bandwidth. According to the calculator, the other options would cost from $12000 to $250000. This is roughly cost for 35 - 730 years of all our current services combined (CF cert, 2x VPS, domain). Looking at the detailed pricing, it might be affected by me being in Europe, but still… Re. some sibling comments – never got any e-mail from CF suggesting to move to their paid plan.
wuyishan 8y ago
Akamai has different products, coming with different price tags/GB. Which product does this site take in to consideration? Edit: ah, it's the azure resell.
- jimaek 8y ago
  Yes, its the only public pricing we could find for Akamai and some other providers
askaboutit 8y ago
Fastly 1PB: $96,000 OVH 1PB: $6500 Google Cloud: $36,000 CDN pricing is insane.
- magnetic 8y ago
  Is it possible to replace Google Cloud Storage with a CDN? (in other words, find a CDN that lets you manage files - create/delete - and give you a URL to each file with an allowed origin of * to be able to pull it from anywhere?)
  - askaboutit 8y ago
    I think a lot of CDN’s have cloud storage at the CDN site. https://bunnycdn.com/features https://bunnycdn.com/features has multireplication storage coming soon. You could push to their CDN storage sites and then have that served to users. There are lots of CDN’s with storage though. Google CDN, Fastly, Cloudfront, they’re selling you bandwidth as Soda. Buy the meal cheap then pay deeply for the refill.
    - magnetic 8y ago
      That is great thanks! I'm trying to see if there is one that lets you manage client uploads with a token, i.e. the server gives an "upload token" to the client so an "untrusted client" has permission to upload a file on behalf of the server, but without having to send the file to the server. Do you know off the top of your head if any CDN provides this?
ksec 8y ago
Verizon is listed as Azure reseller? What happen to their Edgecast? I wish someone would resell Limestone. I also wish someone in the industry could explain why transfer hasn't gotten cheaper over the years, especially from the big three. Why hasn't other challenged them? Or why lastly managed to gain more customers while being more expensive than those big three.
- jimaek 8y ago
  Azure is reseller of Verizon, which is ex-Edgecast

22 points by jimaek 8y ago

bubaflub 8y ago

Why isn’t Cloudflare listed? They don’t charge for bandwidth so I suppose they’d always be the cheapest.

jimaek 8y ago
That's the reason they are not listed :) They don't have a clear pricing like the other CDNs. They have internal limits and overages for bandwidth but its not public.
- jgrahamc 8y ago
  That's not true. We do not have overages. We don't charge for bandwidth. If you use a lot of bandwidth then we may contact you and see if paying for service makes more sense for you (for example, if you are running a business on our free plan then the level of support you get might not be what you need; or there may be missing features that would help you).
  - jimaek 8y ago
    A close friend of mine also got multiple emails from sales telling that he is using too much bandwidth on the Pro plan and asking to upgrade to $2000/month+ or "else". But they were not able to define what would happen otherwise. Now I guess its just a scare tactic?
    - jgrahamc 8y ago
      I'd like to see those emails. Can you get them and forward them to me? There should not be any "else" in those mails.
  - milankragujevic 8y ago
    Are you sure on the "we do not have overages"? Could I have 100TB of monthly traffic all served by your edge nodes (force cache everything + long expiry + files split into chunks) of legal content (firmware files for embedded devices) and not get kicked off?
    - eastdakota 8y ago
      Yes.
foobarbazetc 8y ago
If you use a lot of bandwidth a CF sales person contacts you and tells you it’s time to pay. And it’s not cheap. More expensive than Fastly in our case (though we went with Google CDN and saved a bunch of money and got better performance).
- ericpauley 8y ago
  Any idea where this limit is? 1TB? 10? 100?
  - chocolatkey 8y ago
    I run a site in cloudflare that's using a little over 2TB/mo (used to be more), and haven't received any email. Would be nice to know what this limit is so we're ready when the time comes
- jgrahamc 8y ago
  I'd love to know what site that was (jgc @ cloudflare . com) so that I can understand why we couldn't offer you a good deal. Also, we don't force people to pay. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17639316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17639316
- eastdakota 8y ago
  This is not correct. While we’ll reach out heavy users to see if they’d like to upgrade to get all the benefits of our Enterprise accounts, if you don’t want to upgrade you can continue to use our base plans. If you ever hear otherwise from a person on our Sales team, please let me know directly because they are wrong and in violation of our explicit policies. My email: matthewatcloudflaredotcom.
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    This story plays out on HN like clockwork 1) Person A recommends CloudFlare as a CDN because it's really cheap 2) Person B warns that the were using CF in this manner and had their account closed 3) CF rep comes in to clarify that no such policy exists
huangbong 8y ago
Cloudflare has a file size limit (512MB) and only caches certain file extensions so for things like binary files, installers, and video it will not cache. For the HTML/CSS/JS asset use case it’s perfectly fine though.
helb 8y ago
I run a local news site with ~ 1.3 TB/month traffic on two cheap VPSs and a free Cloudflare account (paying just for a non-shared SSL certificate, $5 per month). It saves us about 95 % of bandwidth. According to the calculator, the other options would cost from $12000 to $250000. This is roughly cost for 35 - 730 years of all our current services combined (CF cert, 2x VPS, domain). Looking at the detailed pricing, it might be affected by me being in Europe, but still… Re. some sibling comments – never got any e-mail from CF suggesting to move to their paid plan.

wuyishan 8y ago

Akamai has different products, coming with different price tags/GB. Which product does this site take in to consideration? Edit: ah, it's the azure resell.

jimaek 8y ago
Yes, its the only public pricing we could find for Akamai and some other providers

askaboutit 8y ago

Fastly 1PB: $96,000 OVH 1PB: $6500 Google Cloud: $36,000 CDN pricing is insane.

magnetic 8y ago
Is it possible to replace Google Cloud Storage with a CDN? (in other words, find a CDN that lets you manage files - create/delete - and give you a URL to each file with an allowed origin of * to be able to pull it from anywhere?)
- askaboutit 8y ago
  I think a lot of CDN’s have cloud storage at the CDN site. https://bunnycdn.com/features https://bunnycdn.com/features has multireplication storage coming soon. You could push to their CDN storage sites and then have that served to users. There are lots of CDN’s with storage though. Google CDN, Fastly, Cloudfront, they’re selling you bandwidth as Soda. Buy the meal cheap then pay deeply for the refill.
  - magnetic 8y ago
    That is great thanks! I'm trying to see if there is one that lets you manage client uploads with a token, i.e. the server gives an "upload token" to the client so an "untrusted client" has permission to upload a file on behalf of the server, but without having to send the file to the server. Do you know off the top of your head if any CDN provides this?

ksec 8y ago

Verizon is listed as Azure reseller? What happen to their Edgecast? I wish someone would resell Limestone. I also wish someone in the industry could explain why transfer hasn't gotten cheaper over the years, especially from the big three. Why hasn't other challenged them? Or why lastly managed to gain more customers while being more expensive than those big three.

jimaek 8y ago
Azure is reseller of Verizon, which is ex-Edgecast