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Why does cloudflare cost $600k for 2 years? What exactly are they paying for? Surely

vundercind 2y ago
High-transfer users can easily pay tens of thousands a month to a CDN. And not even that high an amount of transfer, even. Not like Steam or someone like that. Cloudflare also offers other services and likes to bundle them with their enterprise accounts. They don’t really compete on transfer costs vs other decent CDNs. They prefer you’re using lots of their stuff than just watching the meter every month. They may have been using other services, too.
- udev4096 2y ago
  Why not rent servers from hetzner or ovh for a lot less and setup a CDN of their own? Or is it difficult to do that?
  - vundercind 2y ago
    TL;DR actually delivering serious quantities of bits to clients globally is kinda hard and costs real money. The just-rent-servers scheme presents the following issues: 1) Won’t get you anywhere near as good a network of globally-distributed servers. [edit] I mean, maybe, but at that point you’re looking at a fair amount of cost in vendor management—you’ll probably need several hosting providers to even approach it. 2) You need minimum three good full-time ops people to build and support such a thing. What’s the salary on that over two years? Even with Polish salaries or what have you, it’s cheaper, but not cheap. Let’s say $300,000 fully-loaded cost over two years, just for a nice round number, for three ops/sysadmin sorts. Even in cheaper markets, that may be underestimating what it’d take. Halfway there already, and you haven’t rented servers or rack space yet. I’m not gonna claim that your infra will also work far less well and break more often than Cloudflare, because sometimes these sorts of set-ups do end up being rather stable because they can be far simpler and smaller-scale than an as-a-service product, but that is a risk if it’s not done quite well. 3) Server providers may drop you if you get too expensive. Get DDOS’d too much, just use their bandwidth too heavily but within your nominal limits. It’s a risk. 4) Those rented servers do cost money, and add to the operations salaries costs above. Buy servers? Also money, and now you need to rent rack space and bandwidth. 5) Peering agreements for server hosts are sometimes bad. It’s hard to know whether yours is bad until you do something at-scale on it and see support tickets roll in for consistently dial-up speeds for clients who really ought to be seeing better than that. This info doesn’t make service comparison spec sheets. 6) CDNs have usually put in some effort to solve e.g. China deliverability. You’re starting from scratch as far as political difficulties go.

High-transfer users can easily pay tens of thousands a month to a CDN. And not even that high an amount of transfer, even. Not like Steam or someone like that. Cloudflare also offers other services and likes to bundle them with their enterprise accounts. They don’t really compete on transfer costs vs other decent CDNs. They prefer you’re using lots of their stuff than just watching the meter every month. They may have been using other services, too.

udev4096 2y ago
Why not rent servers from hetzner or ovh for a lot less and setup a CDN of their own? Or is it difficult to do that?
- vundercind 2y ago
  TL;DR actually delivering serious quantities of bits to clients globally is kinda hard and costs real money. The just-rent-servers scheme presents the following issues: 1) Won’t get you anywhere near as good a network of globally-distributed servers. [edit] I mean, maybe, but at that point you’re looking at a fair amount of cost in vendor management—you’ll probably need several hosting providers to even approach it. 2) You need minimum three good full-time ops people to build and support such a thing. What’s the salary on that over two years? Even with Polish salaries or what have you, it’s cheaper, but not cheap. Let’s say $300,000 fully-loaded cost over two years, just for a nice round number, for three ops/sysadmin sorts. Even in cheaper markets, that may be underestimating what it’d take. Halfway there already, and you haven’t rented servers or rack space yet. I’m not gonna claim that your infra will also work far less well and break more often than Cloudflare, because sometimes these sorts of set-ups do end up being rather stable because they can be far simpler and smaller-scale than an as-a-service product, but that is a risk if it’s not done quite well. 3) Server providers may drop you if you get too expensive. Get DDOS’d too much, just use their bandwidth too heavily but within your nominal limits. It’s a risk. 4) Those rented servers do cost money, and add to the operations salaries costs above. Buy servers? Also money, and now you need to rent rack space and bandwidth. 5) Peering agreements for server hosts are sometimes bad. It’s hard to know whether yours is bad until you do something at-scale on it and see support tickets roll in for consistently dial-up speeds for clients who really ought to be seeing better than that. This info doesn’t make service comparison spec sheets. 6) CDNs have usually put in some effort to solve e.g. China deliverability. You’re starting from scratch as far as political difficulties go.