6 ms·

As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can

As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.) Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switched. I just tested and Cloudflare is still taking 48ms their own DNS server to resolve our Cloudflare-hosted DNS, but only 14ms for Fastly to establish a connection and send the first byte. That speed does make a difference. When we switched from Cloudflare to Fastly we had about a 7% increase in completed sales. I think their ROI is still too low for most small businesses, the only way that actually makes sense for us is because it's free for open source/nonprofits. But I can imagine it's a big deal for larger ones.

mxpxrocks10 8y ago
hi- curious about your completed sales stats. What are you selling? was it instant? was it gross top line?
- tylermenezes 8y ago
  We sell low-cost tickets to events to largely non-technical students. On the order of 10k sales a year, so we're nowhere near enterprise scale (which is also why we couldn't use Akamai). www.srnd.org if you'd like to learn more.
sjwright 8y ago
I find it difficult to believe that sales would be affected by a latency drop less than one tenth of a second. How did you isolate the variables?
- dubcanada 8y ago
  I am going to assume there is more to it then that. Even Amazon only says 100ms increments affect sales.
  - tylermenezes 8y ago
    There was a difference of usable site time of about 500-600ms
- an_account_name 8y ago
  No, this absolutely checks with my experience - I chase 5 and 10ms improvements all the time because we've measured and know it increases conversion. But it makes sense, too: if the metric here is average latency, that doesn't mean that some users didn't see a much more dramatic increase. Every tiny bit of frustration removed from the experience adds up.
  - treis 8y ago
    >No, this absolutely checks with my experience - I chase 5 and 10ms improvements all the time because we've measured and know it increases conversion. You've measured and know that a user seeing a 905ms load time converts more than one seeing 915ms?
    - edmundsauto 8y ago
      A 10ms average improvement could mean 1 in 1000 customers went from 10s to 1s without any other change to other customers. This is easily possible if you have a highly distributed customer base, and/or some small segment of your customers don't have good upstream peering with your provider.
      - treis 8y ago
        >A 10ms average improvement could mean 1 in 1000 customers went from 10s to 1s without any other change to other customers. Which is why I asked the question in the way that I did. I buy that a slimmed down webpage loading 10 ms faster on average will increase conversions because that makes the site usable for the visitors on bad connections. Moving to a CDN doesn't have that impact. It shaves off 10-100ms across the board.
        edmundsauto 8y ago
        > Moving to a CDN doesn't have that impact. It shaves off 10-100ms across the board. I think this is where we disagree. I've seen (firsthand and through analytics) situations where using a CDN can dramatically improve response time in a small subset of customers (while also getting the across the board win for most customers). I've also seen CDNs (Amazon's in the early days) that were signficantly slower than direct to linode, even with a warm cache. It's a weird world, and packet routing is hard.
bufferoverflow 8y ago
I highly doubt your claims about Cloudflare being an order of magnitude slower, they are consistently one of the fastest CDNs: https://www.cdnperf.com/ https://www.cdnperf.com/ Top 15: 1 Google Cloud CDN 36.70 ms 2 jsDelivr CDN 36.80 ms 3 Akamai CDN 38.00 ms 4 Verizon (Edgecast) CDN 38.30 ms 5 Azure CDN 38.50 ms 6 Fastly CDN 41.38 ms 7 Cloudflare CDN 41.80 ms 8 AWS CloudFront CDN 43.00 ms 9 CacheFly 43.90 ms 10 BunnyCDN 46.00 ms 11 StackPath CDN 46.53 ms 12 KeyCDN 47.00 ms 13 CDN.NET 48.46 ms 14 G-Core Labs CDN 48.74 ms 15 Quantil CDN 50.20 ms
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  Everything about what the top comment said seems like Fastly marketing propaganda. 7% increase in sales? With what sample size? With what confidence? How did you isolate variables? For reference, I work at a company with $110M in annual sales. We were planning to start using Fastly. For obvious reasons, we wanted to know how much of a net positive that would be for the business. So we wanted to A/B test it. For us, at least, it's not as straight forward as it would seem.
  - tylermenezes 8y ago
    You can Google my name if you think I'm working for Fastly. The only connection I have is that they are our CDN. They donate it, as we're a nonprofit, but I have zero obligation to say anything about them either way. 7% increase represents an increase in the number of students/parents purchasing tickets to our events. (It's not like they're spending more individually, but more people have been willing to give us money.) That's based on several years with no substantial change in the way we market or the design of our site.
    - icedchai 8y ago
      How do you know the 7% increase was due to Fastly and not some other small unrelated change to your web site? A few 10 ms makes no difference.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cosjef 8y ago
DISCLAIMER: Akamai Product Manager here. Deployment times for config changes have been operating at the sub-5m timeframe for at least two years. It used to take hours (never days) to propagate changes across the server estate, but not anymore. And while we were admittedly late to the DevOps train, we have made up lost ground. We have nearly 100 individual APIs to control almost any aspect of our products. CLIs if you don't want to write to the API. A Sandbox to test config changes locally. The ability to validate OAuth tokens at the Edge, cache GraphQL responses, and throttle and/or quota API traffic on a global basis. Hashtag "legacy CDN."
- directionless 8y ago
  What's the purge time like?
  - sidd_p 8y ago
    Less than 5s across all 240K+ global servers
- tylermenezes 8y ago
  I'm not talking about Akamai directly, I'm talking about the Azure interface, which is as close to Akamai as most HN commenters are likely to get. Akamai itself is great but the Azure interface makes you (and VZN) look terrible
- notyourday 8y ago
  > Deployment times for config changes have been operating at the sub-5m timeframe for at least two years. Fastly is sub 5 seconds. > And while we were admittedly late to the DevOps train, we have made up lost ground. Not anywhere close. Your cache invalidation takes forever. Ability to assign tag objects does not exist. Engaging "professional services" to make a config change like it is 2002?
  - siwyd 8y ago
    > Not anywhere close. Your cache invalidation takes forever. Ability to assign tag objects does not exist. Engaging "professional services" to make a config change like it is 2002? Akamai also has a fast purge these days, sub 5 seconds as well I believe. Works nicely.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mherdeg 8y ago
> That speed does make a difference. When we switched from Cloudflare to Fastly we had about a 7% increase in completed sales. Interesting. Is that for the flow that starts at https://www.srnd.org/sponsor https://www.srnd.org/sponsor => https://www.srnd.org/sponsor/pay https://www.srnd.org/sponsor/pay or somewhere else? (Those pages do load very fast.)

mxpxrocks10 8y ago

hi- curious about your completed sales stats. What are you selling? was it instant? was it gross top line?

tylermenezes 8y ago
We sell low-cost tickets to events to largely non-technical students. On the order of 10k sales a year, so we're nowhere near enterprise scale (which is also why we couldn't use Akamai). www.srnd.org if you'd like to learn more.

sjwright 8y ago

I find it difficult to believe that sales would be affected by a latency drop less than one tenth of a second. How did you isolate the variables?

dubcanada 8y ago
I am going to assume there is more to it then that. Even Amazon only says 100ms increments affect sales.
- tylermenezes 8y ago
  There was a difference of usable site time of about 500-600ms
an_account_name 8y ago
No, this absolutely checks with my experience - I chase 5 and 10ms improvements all the time because we've measured and know it increases conversion. But it makes sense, too: if the metric here is average latency, that doesn't mean that some users didn't see a much more dramatic increase. Every tiny bit of frustration removed from the experience adds up.
- treis 8y ago
  >No, this absolutely checks with my experience - I chase 5 and 10ms improvements all the time because we've measured and know it increases conversion. You've measured and know that a user seeing a 905ms load time converts more than one seeing 915ms?
  - edmundsauto 8y ago
    A 10ms average improvement could mean 1 in 1000 customers went from 10s to 1s without any other change to other customers. This is easily possible if you have a highly distributed customer base, and/or some small segment of your customers don't have good upstream peering with your provider.
    - treis 8y ago
      >A 10ms average improvement could mean 1 in 1000 customers went from 10s to 1s without any other change to other customers. Which is why I asked the question in the way that I did. I buy that a slimmed down webpage loading 10 ms faster on average will increase conversions because that makes the site usable for the visitors on bad connections. Moving to a CDN doesn't have that impact. It shaves off 10-100ms across the board.
      - edmundsauto 8y ago
        > Moving to a CDN doesn't have that impact. It shaves off 10-100ms across the board. I think this is where we disagree. I've seen (firsthand and through analytics) situations where using a CDN can dramatically improve response time in a small subset of customers (while also getting the across the board win for most customers). I've also seen CDNs (Amazon's in the early days) that were signficantly slower than direct to linode, even with a warm cache. It's a weird world, and packet routing is hard.

bufferoverflow 8y ago

I highly doubt your claims about Cloudflare being an order of magnitude slower, they are consistently one of the fastest CDNs: https://www.cdnperf.com/ https://www.cdnperf.com/ Top 15: 1 Google Cloud CDN 36.70 ms 2 jsDelivr CDN 36.80 ms 3 Akamai CDN 38.00 ms 4 Verizon (Edgecast) CDN 38.30 ms 5 Azure CDN 38.50 ms 6 Fastly CDN 41.38 ms 7 Cloudflare CDN 41.80 ms 8 AWS CloudFront CDN 43.00 ms 9 CacheFly 43.90 ms 10 BunnyCDN 46.00 ms 11 StackPath CDN 46.53 ms 12 KeyCDN 47.00 ms 13 CDN.NET 48.46 ms 14 G-Core Labs CDN 48.74 ms 15 Quantil CDN 50.20 ms

onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
Everything about what the top comment said seems like Fastly marketing propaganda. 7% increase in sales? With what sample size? With what confidence? How did you isolate variables? For reference, I work at a company with $110M in annual sales. We were planning to start using Fastly. For obvious reasons, we wanted to know how much of a net positive that would be for the business. So we wanted to A/B test it. For us, at least, it's not as straight forward as it would seem.
- tylermenezes 8y ago
  You can Google my name if you think I'm working for Fastly. The only connection I have is that they are our CDN. They donate it, as we're a nonprofit, but I have zero obligation to say anything about them either way. 7% increase represents an increase in the number of students/parents purchasing tickets to our events. (It's not like they're spending more individually, but more people have been willing to give us money.) That's based on several years with no substantial change in the way we market or the design of our site.
  - icedchai 8y ago
    How do you know the 7% increase was due to Fastly and not some other small unrelated change to your web site? A few 10 ms makes no difference.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cosjef 8y ago

DISCLAIMER: Akamai Product Manager here. Deployment times for config changes have been operating at the sub-5m timeframe for at least two years. It used to take hours (never days) to propagate changes across the server estate, but not anymore. And while we were admittedly late to the DevOps train, we have made up lost ground. We have nearly 100 individual APIs to control almost any aspect of our products. CLIs if you don't want to write to the API. A Sandbox to test config changes locally. The ability to validate OAuth tokens at the Edge, cache GraphQL responses, and throttle and/or quota API traffic on a global basis. Hashtag "legacy CDN."

directionless 8y ago
What's the purge time like?
- sidd_p 8y ago
  Less than 5s across all 240K+ global servers
tylermenezes 8y ago
I'm not talking about Akamai directly, I'm talking about the Azure interface, which is as close to Akamai as most HN commenters are likely to get. Akamai itself is great but the Azure interface makes you (and VZN) look terrible
notyourday 8y ago
> Deployment times for config changes have been operating at the sub-5m timeframe for at least two years. Fastly is sub 5 seconds. > And while we were admittedly late to the DevOps train, we have made up lost ground. Not anywhere close. Your cache invalidation takes forever. Ability to assign tag objects does not exist. Engaging "professional services" to make a config change like it is 2002?
- siwyd 8y ago
  > Not anywhere close. Your cache invalidation takes forever. Ability to assign tag objects does not exist. Engaging "professional services" to make a config change like it is 2002? Akamai also has a fast purge these days, sub 5 seconds as well I believe. Works nicely.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mherdeg 8y ago

> That speed does make a difference. When we switched from Cloudflare to Fastly we had about a 7% increase in completed sales. Interesting. Is that for the flow that starts at https://www.srnd.org/sponsor https://www.srnd.org/sponsor => https://www.srnd.org/sponsor/pay https://www.srnd.org/sponsor/pay or somewhere else? (Those pages do load very fast.)