Show HN: Simple File Hosting on a CDN | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Simple File Hosting on a CDN

fast.io

75 pointsredm29 comments

First time I’ve seen a Terms of Use clause like this one: “Light patterns, like those which might be displayed when using the Services, may result in epileptic seizures in some people. Discontinue use of the Services, if advised by your physician or you experience epileptic symptoms.”

I don't think there's much danger of epileptic seizures when using Fast.io, thats lawyers for you. ;)

Hrm, I've been using Netlify for static site hosting, and the ability to push from other cloud storage might actually make me want to switch, or at least try this out.

For small static sites, I really feel like it's overkill putting them in a repo or having to drag the "whole site" in everytime from a zip file or folder. Especially for small incremental changes that happen often.

If my understanding is correct, I can have a folder in another cloud storage service (or even on my PC), that when I change a single file there- Fast.IO will notice that change and publish/replicate it to the live site. That's pretty neat.

Yes, that's exactly right! As we were developing the early versions of our homepage that's exactly how we used it. I just synced down a Google Drive folder and hacked away on code and images. Derek could check out the progress anytime he wanted by visiting the URL. Basically, our homepage was always live while we were developing it - great for our MVP.

Now that the homepage codebase is more mature and we have more people working on it, we just created a GitHub repo in that same folder. Now whatever I'm working on is deployed to fastdev.imfast.io and then when I commit to the master branch of the repo, it's synced to fastio.imfast.io (which is connected to our domains Fast.io, Fast.app, Fastio.com etc..). I have a password-protected private dev site, but I'll keep that one to myself for now :D

Great! Thanks for the reply. This sounds like it just might fit my needs exactly :) I'll give it a trial run here soon

Hey HN. I created Fast.io as a workflow tool for file hosting. Instead of pushing files to S3, and configuring CloudFront, I wanted more of a "syncing" experience, like Dropbox. The other problem I wanted to solve was log parsing; in other words, I didn't want to log parse. So Fast.io parses the logs for me and sends them right to Google Analytics.

It works as you would expect, and supports files up to 1GB at a price lower than S3/CloudFront.

It's been a long time in the making, I hope you like it!

This is pretty useful! Putting blinders on and working with a project on my laptop and knowing the folder it's in is automagically getting synced with an actual CDN as well as everything being updated in real-time as I make changes??? Sounds pretty sweet. On my last project I wasted an entire damn day dealing with setting up GH-Pages and another project with Coudflair, a regular hosting company and a few tools to automate my workflow. I really like that all of this is out of the box in this product!

I find it at the very least strange that this CDN gets submitted to HN twice today, and you post the exact same extremely positive comment on both submissions.

Hey there, a long story short, it was accidentally launched on PH a day early so we were running around a bit crazy earlier today. I submitted it earlier as a Launch with a comment/copy and paste but realized it should have been a Show. I also wanted to write the comment myself instead of the copy/paste.

Thanks for your interest!

You find it strange that this was reposted and when I saw it I didn't want to re-write a totally different comment once I saw it? I find this service useful. I mean what's not exciting and useful about hosting a site from within your personal dropbox on your laptop? Also, I find it very strange that you have nothing better to do than police HN.

> Also, I find it very strange that you have nothing better to do than police HN.

Your comment would have been just fine without that last sentence.

(I'm still in the process of waking up and so I have nothing better to do, in case you find this comment strange.)

How is this different from Netlify? I've used Netlify as a CDN before, which syncs from git repository. I'm trying to understand when I'd use this service.

Hi, a good question, I had a chance to attend the latest JAMstack event in SF, and Netlify is a great product. We aren't trying to compete with them. At a technical level, Netlify is a "build" up platform, and we are a CDN down platform.

Netlify takes a snapshot from VCS and performs a build process. This is imaged into a container and then Netlify has their "CDN" in front of it.

Fast.io is an origin, so processing is largely event driven, pulled on demand, cached on our L2 cache, and pushed to the edge. It's a more traditional CDN model.

There are lots of practical differences. 1) We don't have a build system. 2) We have much larger file limits, up to 20GB. 3) We focus on object analytics, not through our own UI, but by integrating with Mixpanel and Google Analytics. 4) Netlify optimizes content in the build process, we optimize as data passes through. The list goes on.

Netlify also charges a lot (the price just went up) $1000 for an "Enterprise" CDN. We are built around them.

More practically, we focus on object storage and distribution, which is great for files but not for site builds.

It's been a long day, I hope that answered your question.

I'll do my best to answer your question in a different way.

What differentiates Fast.io from Netlify:

1. Simplicity: GitHub + Cloud Storage integration allows an extremely simple workflow (for technical and non-technical people alike). This enables us to handle files up to 1GB each, unlike Netlify which maxes out at 10MB unless you add Large Media support which modifies your Git repo.

2. Enterprise CDN included with Free: We work with CloudFlare and Akamai to provide their full Enterprise capabilities to all users, including Free. Netlify only provides a real CDN to their Enterprise customers - they call it "Enterprise CDN".

3. Analytics: We integrate directly with Google Analytics (and future MixPanel) directly from the CDN - so you can get complete analytics data on even direct file downloads - no javascript required. Unlike Netlify who only gives their own analysis tools, with us you can leverage Google and MixPanel’s much more powerful interfaces and tools.

Most of the same can be said for all other competitors in the static hosting space - and yes, simplicity is probably our true key differentiator, especially compared to Amazon S3, GCP, or Azure.

We think we’re a great developer tool, but we may be better positioned to offer powerful features to novice developers or non-developers (marketing people, designers, etc..).

Looks very nice, more competing companies in this space is nice. I mean there are not that many and it seems only netlify is innovating in this space.

Am i wrong or is the very slick website based on a theme? I could guess i have seen it before.

Thanks for the kind words. I would say we are not trying to compete with Netlify. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590512

To answer your question about a theme, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590473

Congrats on the launch. This is a very beautiful landing page. Did you use a landing page builder or is it all hand-coded?

Hi, thanks for the kind words! I'm Tom, co-founder of Fast.io. We started with a basic Bootstrap template and then heavily customized it (hand-coded). I'm really glad you like it! We've agonized over the messaging, illustrations, and animation quite a bit. I'm sure we still have a lot we can still improve but we're really proud of how it came out.

Actually, I should mention that it was really interesting to build our homepage on our own platform. We started out roughing it in really quickly in a shared Google Drive folder that deployed to a public URL (https://fastdev.imfast.io for example) then, once we started to have more people working on it and required version control, we switched the site over to GitHub and started deploying there. It's a little mind-bending to just hit save and watch a public site update.

This looks like a really cool product!

I just have to say though, this landing page is incredibly pretty. Anyone involved in its design should be proud. I really like it. It renders beautifully on both my mobile and desktop.

Thanks again!! Really appreciate it! It was definitely a team effort.

So do you have some arrangement with Cloudflare to satisfy the the "Limitation on Non-HTML Caching" part of their terms?

Hi, yes, we contract with CloudFlare and Akamai for CDN services at scale, and package them in a SaaS service that provides the rest of the stack. There is no Non-HTML caching limits for us. We do have a 1GB file limit on CloudFlare and a 20GB limit on Akamai. Thanks for your interest!

Is this static only? Can this host WordPress sites?

it's static only. wordpress will not work. though you can use javascript logic that will be evaluated in browser

I like the Google analytics integration. I wish other providers would add this feature too.

Are there any open source tools that you can use to parse a log and perhaps batch-submit to Google analytics?

So this is CDN reselling with ease of use added?

Hi, not so much CDN reselling as providing a stack that fills out everything under the CDN.

We terminate the origin by syncing from an existing Cloud Storage (Dropbox, Google Drive) or Version Control System (GitHub). We also automate the analytics end by parsing the logs that would normally be in raw format.

The idea is focused at the same use case where you would put content on S3 and pair it with a CDN, our product is just easier to use, faster to setup, and at a comparable or lower price point.

Thanks for your interest!

congrats, the product looks great!

Thanks so much, we appreciate your support!

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