What are you using for file hosting on a CDN?
Hello everyone,
We've already built a CDN product, namely Fast.io, and acquired about 25k users. Most of those users are on our Free tier and are typically hosting relatively low-traffic websites/apps. We also some larger businesses that are distributing marketing assets and premium content (videos, documents, etc..) at scale.
We're considering a pivot into something more focused... a simple, turn-key solution for file hosting on a CDN (upload, management, transformation, optimization, and CDN distribution).
My question is...
What are you using to handle files and CDN file hosting for your apps?
BunnyCDN is really killing it right now, awesome service.
It's a fast / efficient / cheap CDN that handles a ton of bandwidth for us slightly more reliably than our b2 storage instance (Backblaze, trailing 18 months) -- and now with redundancy / geo-replication on the storage side.
I felt like I was taking a chance on them 2 years ago but it's continuously improved since.
Fast.io looks interesting, I think I checked this out a while back, the Analytics feature seems new.
I'm guessing you take in a standard log format (like s3 would generate) and then do the ETL on your end automatically to push analytics events to Mixpanel and Google?
That looks really awesome. Do you have a blog post / video / demo / etc. of that? Cookie-less Google Analytics is something I'd be super interested in studying up on.
Thanks @futhey ! Yes, you nailed it, that's essentially how we do it. It bypasses adblockers and can give you more granular (per-file) analytics. We actually have some IP on this so we definitely think it's novel and interesting too. Unfortunately, we don't have a blog post on it yet, but that's actually a great idea - we need to do a better job of putting this information out there. Suffice to say though, you have the right idea.
The other really novel thing we have is the instant syncing with cloud storage to the CDN which is great for light applications. For larger more sensitive apps though, it leaves something to be desired so we're adding our own storage layer as well.
That's awesome, good luck!
It's a really compelling use-case in the era of GDPR & new privacy laws.
We're no longer using a completely static site, unfortunately. But, I'll definitely check this out with something small.
I don't have much use of CDN for Formito.com. My main use is for the trigger script (https://s.formito.com/ft.js) which is use Firebase Hosting.
Thanks for the feedback! Where do you currently host your landing page and app?
On Firebase Hosting. My static stuff are all on Firebase Hosting, and the API is on Google App Engine.
We use backblaze b2 and cloudflare for taskbill.io, we currently don’t pay for either since our usage is within the free plan for both at the moment.
Thank you for the info! How was that for you to set up and configure? Did you have any concerns about access control or security? Once you layer Cloudflare on top of it, there's generally no security (except obscurity) was that a problem (when it comes to customer files or ugc)?
Backblaze made it easy, you can set files to be private by default and we use rails active storage to handle everything else.
I haven’t used it in production yet but take a look at Digital Ocean Spaces. In my experience so far it basically just a more user friendly AWS S3, you can use the same code and every like node and multer S3 packages.
I worked at a company that a large part of it's operation was using hosted videos on s3 with CDN
Thanks for the feedback! On S3, I'm assuming you used Cloudfront? Do you know why they chose S3 for videos? Was it user videos or a library of videos the company owned?
Yes, they did use CloudFront. The company owned the videos, and had crazy amounts of traffic to them, tens to hundreds of thousands a day.
I use BunnyCDN to store my static assets and also host static websites. I love them because of their speed, cost and also they have Geo distributed storage.
I really dig imgix.com. It has a lot of extra features on top of being a CDN though.
Imgix doesn't actually provide much of a storage option, right? Did you store your images anywhere special?
To answer your question: S3.
I'm using AWS S3 (direct user uploads via the javascript sdk), then with cloudfront on top of it. Since everything else I'm doing is in AWS, the minimal costs are not even on my radar.
That makes total sense. May I ask what kind of user uploads are you're primarily working with (media type)?
PDFs of academic/scientific posters. I pull them down to make png thumbnails but otherwise it's really easy to handle.
I use Netlify, they have a pretty generous free tier. I use CloudFlare on top of it for faster image serving. So far ZeroToUsers.com is pretty fast, thanks to this config.
You use Netlify for file hosting or website hosting?
Both.
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago