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I'm going to say this on the posibility of this being seen as a flamebait... But You should have chosen Akamai over Cloudflare. It's so funny how everybody jum

I'm going to say this on the posibility of this being seen as a flamebait... But You should have chosen Akamai over Cloudflare. It's so funny how everybody jumps on top of new companies that say they can proxy all of the interwebz for a low price. (Cloudflare, Blackberry) And then they fail...

rdl 14y ago
Akamai won't even talk to people for $0, $25, or $200/mo. I doubt they'd do so for $3000/mo, directly, unless they thought you'd grow.
- SchizoDuckie 14y ago
  So if you spent just $200/mo on a CDN, Did you really need that CDN at all?
  - rdl 14y ago
    That's irrelevant. A free hobby site might be worth spending $200/mo on CDN for, but I'm not going to drop the $10-30k/mo to get an $AKAM sales rep to call me back. If you're doing mostly static data which rarely changes, you can probably get very high hit rates on CloudFlare, and it's cheaper than even crappy $750/Gbps/mo colo bandwidth then.
    - LemonDrizzle 14y ago
      Rackspace Cloud Files is powered by Akamai.
      - rdl 14y ago
        I thought it was Limelight by default, and you had to pay extra for Akamai. (EDIT: I guess they switched; I haven't kept up with Rackspace)
- saurik 14y ago
  At that $3k/mo level, you can definitely talk to CDNetworks (the CDN I currently use), which is sandwiched between two orders of magnitude of scale, CloudFlare on one side and Akamai on the other. (That said, CDNetworks seems to be much better positioned with regards to China than Akamai.) (That said, I'm actually pretty certain that Akamai would talk to you at the $3k/mo level: have you even tried calling them?)
  - rdl 14y ago
    They'd talk to you if you were a startup and $3k, but probably not so much (directly) if there wasn't growth potential. There are hosting providers who resell Akamai for smaller customers, though. (The only time I ever cared about high-end CDN involved businesses Akamai wouldn't serve, though.) I haven't gone through the normal sales route with them, but I know lots of internal Akamai people in security/ops/etc. and small customers are not really their market. CDN itself is essentially a commodity; it's not too hard to keep multiple CDNs in rotation. There are probably 20+ big CDNs worth consideration and another bunch of resellers. (Amazon CloudFront, BitGravity, Level3, Limelight are probably the first ones I'd think of for smaller sites; Akamai is still the undisputed king for top performance.) DNS is the thing which is more interesting to me. I'd probably go with Route53 for cheap good anycast DNS right now; everyone else seems to either be a clown or super expensive (or bundled with other expensive DNS service). Ultimately I guess I'll end up doing internal DNS. (non-anycast DNS is also a total commodity, but good anycast dns not as much) DynECT also looks pretty good. Not sure what other anycast DNS providers there are in the <$500/zone/mo range.
    - saurik 14y ago
      > There are hosting providers who resell Akamai for smaller customers, though. There are also many other CDNs that exist in the massive territory between CloudFlare and Akamai (such as CDNetworks, the company I had mentioned). > CDN itself is essentially a commodity; it's not too hard to keep multiple CDNs in rotation. For latency-insensitive use cases in generally centralized territory, I agree that CDNs are "essentially a commodity". The correct strategy would seem to be to call a number of them, and negotiate a good deal, not to assume that the one that has a printed sticker price is somehow the right choice (as some people here seem to have been doing ;P). However, to make the counter-point to this: the cache hit ratio that is being reported by CloudFlare for evasi0n.com (note: I do not have control over that site's hosting; that's choice was due to planetbeing and pod2g) is 81% <- this is for a static single-page information site. How various CDNs handle caching, whether they cache you on disk or in RAM, what they do with regards to hot connections or pre-fetching... these all have massive performance implications on your website.
- moe 14y ago
  You should avoid Akamai at all costs. They treat you like dirt under their fingernails until you have a 6-figure contract. And even then the experience remains nothing short of surreal... Report a service problem? Welcome to the indian support-center, where you will be slowly spoon-fed the next best canned response that may or may not match your problem. Escalating to anyone with half a clue is near impossible. Need a quote? Wait weeks at a minimum for someone to get back to you. Oh, did we break your reporting? Of course this is your fault, Akamai doesn't make mistakes. Now talk to the hand. If you're in the market for a CDN then there's plenty candidates who will sell you a better experience for less money (Level3, EdgeCast, BitGravity, etc.).
  - rdl 14y ago
    OTOH if you're paying enough, you get really good service and support (I have a bunch of friends who work there who say exactly what you're saying), so figuring out a way to use them through a reseller is actually a fairly legitimate choice.
    - moe 14y ago
      I have to wonder how much is "enough" then, our account wasn't that small when we finally ditched Akamai. Meanwhile none of the other CDNs has given us such a terrible experience. It's almost as if they care, imagine that! When you consider that the performance differences are at best marginal (the only real differences exist on mobile and in emerging markets, and Akamai is not on top of that) there's really no good reason to put up with the spoiled brats of Akamai in this day and age.
- ksec 14y ago
  Um, You could have go with a Akamai Reseller instead? Like Rackspace Cloud? The same goes for EdgeCast, Mediatemple, GoGrid, etc are resellers.
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
Akamai isn't as accessible as Cloudflare. For one example I cannot even see how much they charge for similar services, I'd likely have to get a "quote" which means that the whole thing is out of budget for most small-medium businesses. Akamai's whole web-presents is clearly aimed at enterprise class customers. I mean there are whitepapers everywhere, the site is filled with business nonsense and I cannot even get started without at least a phone call or five. Maybe people "jump on" to new companies because those companies actually offer a product old companies are not? I can go to Cloudflare right now and sign up, I can give them my CC info and pay, and everything is up-front and easy. I can be online with Cloudflare within the hour (or whenever DNS moves).
- saurik 14y ago
  I have been using CDNs since I was a very small business (CacheFly, EdgeCast, and now CDNetworks), and if you are seriously using CloudFlare because you haven't even tried setting up a phone call with Akamai due to some kind of mental aversion, you are doing your business a disservice. (I mean, seriously: is the 20 minutes you might waste really that valuable? What's the harm... it might even go well!)
  - PeterisP 14y ago
    Service sales 101 - if a business model contains manually/individually quoting every potential customer, then your prices cannot possibly be reasonably low, as your sales model requires enterprise-level prices to pay for your salesmen. It's not that I can't spend 20 minutes on call - but if your customer acquisition costs involve at least 20 minutes of salesman-time per a possible lead (thus, at least 200 minutes of salesman-time for even the smallest sign-up), then I'm very sure that whatever number they will quote - that number will not be something that I can or want to afford. Let them pester some 'enterprises' with that.
    - saurik 14y ago
      Again, I have been using CDNs for a while now, including one that is much larger than CloudFlare (CDNetworks), and on various occasions I have talked with Akamai to get quotes. In my book, CloudFlare reams medium-sized companies on price, and they can do that precisely because people such as yourself have miscalibrated your "I'm getting screwed" detector. (The same is true of Amazon CloudFront, btw.) In essence, once you realize people have this algorithm (specifically, where they don't even bother calling a sales person) it is trivial to exploit you by quoting a large price that you will never do comparison on (and then, rather than compete on price, you end up competing on a ton of questionable value-adds, and do price discrimination on things like 24/7 support).

rdl 14y ago

Akamai won't even talk to people for $0, $25, or $200/mo. I doubt they'd do so for $3000/mo, directly, unless they thought you'd grow.

SchizoDuckie 14y ago
So if you spent just $200/mo on a CDN, Did you really need that CDN at all?
- rdl 14y ago
  That's irrelevant. A free hobby site might be worth spending $200/mo on CDN for, but I'm not going to drop the $10-30k/mo to get an $AKAM sales rep to call me back. If you're doing mostly static data which rarely changes, you can probably get very high hit rates on CloudFlare, and it's cheaper than even crappy $750/Gbps/mo colo bandwidth then.
  - LemonDrizzle 14y ago
    Rackspace Cloud Files is powered by Akamai.
    - rdl 14y ago
      I thought it was Limelight by default, and you had to pay extra for Akamai. (EDIT: I guess they switched; I haven't kept up with Rackspace)
saurik 14y ago
At that $3k/mo level, you can definitely talk to CDNetworks (the CDN I currently use), which is sandwiched between two orders of magnitude of scale, CloudFlare on one side and Akamai on the other. (That said, CDNetworks seems to be much better positioned with regards to China than Akamai.) (That said, I'm actually pretty certain that Akamai would talk to you at the $3k/mo level: have you even tried calling them?)
- rdl 14y ago
  They'd talk to you if you were a startup and $3k, but probably not so much (directly) if there wasn't growth potential. There are hosting providers who resell Akamai for smaller customers, though. (The only time I ever cared about high-end CDN involved businesses Akamai wouldn't serve, though.) I haven't gone through the normal sales route with them, but I know lots of internal Akamai people in security/ops/etc. and small customers are not really their market. CDN itself is essentially a commodity; it's not too hard to keep multiple CDNs in rotation. There are probably 20+ big CDNs worth consideration and another bunch of resellers. (Amazon CloudFront, BitGravity, Level3, Limelight are probably the first ones I'd think of for smaller sites; Akamai is still the undisputed king for top performance.) DNS is the thing which is more interesting to me. I'd probably go with Route53 for cheap good anycast DNS right now; everyone else seems to either be a clown or super expensive (or bundled with other expensive DNS service). Ultimately I guess I'll end up doing internal DNS. (non-anycast DNS is also a total commodity, but good anycast dns not as much) DynECT also looks pretty good. Not sure what other anycast DNS providers there are in the <$500/zone/mo range.
  - saurik 14y ago
    > There are hosting providers who resell Akamai for smaller customers, though. There are also many other CDNs that exist in the massive territory between CloudFlare and Akamai (such as CDNetworks, the company I had mentioned). > CDN itself is essentially a commodity; it's not too hard to keep multiple CDNs in rotation. For latency-insensitive use cases in generally centralized territory, I agree that CDNs are "essentially a commodity". The correct strategy would seem to be to call a number of them, and negotiate a good deal, not to assume that the one that has a printed sticker price is somehow the right choice (as some people here seem to have been doing ;P). However, to make the counter-point to this: the cache hit ratio that is being reported by CloudFlare for evasi0n.com (note: I do not have control over that site's hosting; that's choice was due to planetbeing and pod2g) is 81% <- this is for a static single-page information site. How various CDNs handle caching, whether they cache you on disk or in RAM, what they do with regards to hot connections or pre-fetching... these all have massive performance implications on your website.
moe 14y ago
You should avoid Akamai at all costs. They treat you like dirt under their fingernails until you have a 6-figure contract. And even then the experience remains nothing short of surreal... Report a service problem? Welcome to the indian support-center, where you will be slowly spoon-fed the next best canned response that may or may not match your problem. Escalating to anyone with half a clue is near impossible. Need a quote? Wait weeks at a minimum for someone to get back to you. Oh, did we break your reporting? Of course this is your fault, Akamai doesn't make mistakes. Now talk to the hand. If you're in the market for a CDN then there's plenty candidates who will sell you a better experience for less money (Level3, EdgeCast, BitGravity, etc.).
- rdl 14y ago
  OTOH if you're paying enough, you get really good service and support (I have a bunch of friends who work there who say exactly what you're saying), so figuring out a way to use them through a reseller is actually a fairly legitimate choice.
  - moe 14y ago
    I have to wonder how much is "enough" then, our account wasn't that small when we finally ditched Akamai. Meanwhile none of the other CDNs has given us such a terrible experience. It's almost as if they care, imagine that! When you consider that the performance differences are at best marginal (the only real differences exist on mobile and in emerging markets, and Akamai is not on top of that) there's really no good reason to put up with the spoiled brats of Akamai in this day and age.
ksec 14y ago
Um, You could have go with a Akamai Reseller instead? Like Rackspace Cloud? The same goes for EdgeCast, Mediatemple, GoGrid, etc are resellers.

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

Akamai isn't as accessible as Cloudflare. For one example I cannot even see how much they charge for similar services, I'd likely have to get a "quote" which means that the whole thing is out of budget for most small-medium businesses. Akamai's whole web-presents is clearly aimed at enterprise class customers. I mean there are whitepapers everywhere, the site is filled with business nonsense and I cannot even get started without at least a phone call or five. Maybe people "jump on" to new companies because those companies actually offer a product old companies are not? I can go to Cloudflare right now and sign up, I can give them my CC info and pay, and everything is up-front and easy. I can be online with Cloudflare within the hour (or whenever DNS moves).

saurik 14y ago
I have been using CDNs since I was a very small business (CacheFly, EdgeCast, and now CDNetworks), and if you are seriously using CloudFlare because you haven't even tried setting up a phone call with Akamai due to some kind of mental aversion, you are doing your business a disservice. (I mean, seriously: is the 20 minutes you might waste really that valuable? What's the harm... it might even go well!)
- PeterisP 14y ago
  Service sales 101 - if a business model contains manually/individually quoting every potential customer, then your prices cannot possibly be reasonably low, as your sales model requires enterprise-level prices to pay for your salesmen. It's not that I can't spend 20 minutes on call - but if your customer acquisition costs involve at least 20 minutes of salesman-time per a possible lead (thus, at least 200 minutes of salesman-time for even the smallest sign-up), then I'm very sure that whatever number they will quote - that number will not be something that I can or want to afford. Let them pester some 'enterprises' with that.
  - saurik 14y ago
    Again, I have been using CDNs for a while now, including one that is much larger than CloudFlare (CDNetworks), and on various occasions I have talked with Akamai to get quotes. In my book, CloudFlare reams medium-sized companies on price, and they can do that precisely because people such as yourself have miscalibrated your "I'm getting screwed" detector. (The same is true of Amazon CloudFront, btw.) In essence, once you realize people have this algorithm (specifically, where they don't even bother calling a sales person) it is trivial to exploit you by quoting a large price that you will never do comparison on (and then, rather than compete on price, you end up competing on a ton of questionable value-adds, and do price discrimination on things like 24/7 support).