5 ms·

The whole point of CDNs is to host static assets, why wouldn't you use one? They are dead simple to use.

by anamexis 11mo ago

DiabloD3 11mo ago
Far more expensive than just having a dumb server somewhere at some normal host. People simply do not understand how expen$ive AWS is, and how little value it actually has for most people.
- anamexis 11mo ago
  Most people will never make it past the free tier on any of CloudFront, Cloudflare, Netlify, Render, etc. You can just drag and drop a folder and have a static site hosted in a few minutes.
- nijave 11mo ago
  It's really a tradeoff of saving time by paying more money. A lot of people chose it when they'd rather not pay more money and end up unhappy A lot of other people also pick it for very narrow use cases where it wouldn't have been that much more time to learn and do it themselves and end up paying a lot of money and also aren't happy It's pretty nice for mid-size startups to completely ignore performance and capacity planning and be able to quickly churn out features while accumulating tech debt and hoping they make it long enough to pay the tech debt back
- dandeto 11mo ago
  A year ago I researched this topic for a static website of my own. All providers I looked at were $5 and I want to say the cheapest I found was slightly lower. By comparison, I am still within free tier limits of AWS S3 and cloudfront (CDN) since I am not getting much traffic. So my website is on edge locations all over the world as part of their CDN for free, but if I host on a single server in Ohio it costs $5/month.
  - massysett 11mo ago
    Did you check NearlyFreeSpeech.net? If you are getting little traffic it costs practically nothing for a static site.
    - pwdisswordfishs 11mo ago
      An idle site that receives no hits still costs around $1.50/month with NearlyFreeSpeech.net since the change that limits the number of "non-production" sites that was instituted from around the time when Cloudflare decided to kick out the white supremacists.
    - dandeto 11mo ago
      Thank you! That did not come up in my search, but it looks great and is reasonably priced. I may use that for another project.
embedding-shape 11mo ago
Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can serve that content as well as any other? Better question is; why default to using more things before you actually need them? Personally, software engineering for me is mostly about trying to avoid accidental complexity. People obsessing about "web scale" and "distributed architecture" before they even figured out if people actually want to use the platform/product/tool they've used tends to add a lot of complexity.
- anamexis 11mo ago
  How is setting up a web server not using more things than you need when you could just drag and drop a folder using one of many different CDN providers? (Or of course set up integrations as you want)
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    Just because you're using a UI doesn't mean it isn't more complicated. I'm thinking "complexity" in terms of things intertwined, rather than "difficult for someone used to use GUIs".
    - anamexis 11mo ago
      And configuring a web server as well as the server it is running on is not intertwined complexity? You're welcome to set up the CDN with a CLI...
    - jazzyjackson 11mo ago
      I'm thinking of complexity as "shit I have to pay for"
- everforward 11mo ago
  > Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can serve that content as well as any other? That's not really true if you care about reliability. You need 2 nodes in case one goes down/gets rebooted/etc, and then you need a way to direct traffic away from bad nodes (via DNS or a load balancer or etc). You'll end up building half of a crappy CDN to try to make that work, and it's way more complicated than chucking CloudFlare in front of static assets. I would be with you if this was something complicated to cache where you're server-side templating responses and can't just globally cache things, but for static HTML/CSS/JS/images it's basically 0 configuration.

The whole point of CDNs is to host static assets, why wouldn't you use one? They are dead simple to use.

Far more expensive than just having a dumb server somewhere at some normal host. People simply do not understand how expen$ive AWS is, and how little value it actually has for most people.

anamexis 11mo ago
Most people will never make it past the free tier on any of CloudFront, Cloudflare, Netlify, Render, etc. You can just drag and drop a folder and have a static site hosted in a few minutes.
nijave 11mo ago
It's really a tradeoff of saving time by paying more money. A lot of people chose it when they'd rather not pay more money and end up unhappy A lot of other people also pick it for very narrow use cases where it wouldn't have been that much more time to learn and do it themselves and end up paying a lot of money and also aren't happy It's pretty nice for mid-size startups to completely ignore performance and capacity planning and be able to quickly churn out features while accumulating tech debt and hoping they make it long enough to pay the tech debt back
dandeto 11mo ago
A year ago I researched this topic for a static website of my own. All providers I looked at were $5 and I want to say the cheapest I found was slightly lower. By comparison, I am still within free tier limits of AWS S3 and cloudfront (CDN) since I am not getting much traffic. So my website is on edge locations all over the world as part of their CDN for free, but if I host on a single server in Ohio it costs $5/month.
- massysett 11mo ago
  Did you check NearlyFreeSpeech.net? If you are getting little traffic it costs practically nothing for a static site.
  - pwdisswordfishs 11mo ago
    An idle site that receives no hits still costs around $1.50/month with NearlyFreeSpeech.net since the change that limits the number of "non-production" sites that was instituted from around the time when Cloudflare decided to kick out the white supremacists.
  - dandeto 11mo ago
    Thank you! That did not come up in my search, but it looks great and is reasonably priced. I may use that for another project.

embedding-shape 11mo ago

Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can serve that content as well as any other? Better question is; why default to using more things before you actually need them? Personally, software engineering for me is mostly about trying to avoid accidental complexity. People obsessing about "web scale" and "distributed architecture" before they even figured out if people actually want to use the platform/product/tool they've used tends to add a lot of complexity.

anamexis 11mo ago
How is setting up a web server not using more things than you need when you could just drag and drop a folder using one of many different CDN providers? (Or of course set up integrations as you want)
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  Just because you're using a UI doesn't mean it isn't more complicated. I'm thinking "complexity" in terms of things intertwined, rather than "difficult for someone used to use GUIs".
  - anamexis 11mo ago
    And configuring a web server as well as the server it is running on is not intertwined complexity? You're welcome to set up the CDN with a CLI...
  - jazzyjackson 11mo ago
    I'm thinking of complexity as "shit I have to pay for"
everforward 11mo ago
> Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can serve that content as well as any other? That's not really true if you care about reliability. You need 2 nodes in case one goes down/gets rebooted/etc, and then you need a way to direct traffic away from bad nodes (via DNS or a load balancer or etc). You'll end up building half of a crappy CDN to try to make that work, and it's way more complicated than chucking CloudFlare in front of static assets. I would be with you if this was something complicated to cache where you're server-side templating responses and can't just globally cache things, but for static HTML/CSS/JS/images it's basically 0 configuration.