Comment by basilgohar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by basilgohar | Hacker News Reader

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Am I the only one that feels using CDNs comes with very little benefit compared to just hosting all resources locally? Almost all security issues go away with locally hosted (i.e., same domain or another domain controlled by the website), plus you avoid an extra DNS lookup, and you still get caching on the same site.

I realize there are benefits, but are the benefits so extreme that they merit all the hype around CDNs? So many developers talk about them like the web would crawl to a halt if they were stopped, but I think that they have their own slippery-slope of problems that has resulted in folks just hand-waving away the expense of web assets since it's a hidden problem from the developer. I doubt actual bytes transferred and latency are affected in a significant way as folk that promote CDNs claim.

It'd be nice to see actual comparisons in a real world scenario. Keep in mind, web site responsiveness is not just linked to download time/size, but also asset processing. If your page is blocking because the JS is still being parsed, the time you saved downloading it is moot.

Yes, the benefits are substantial. I used to have a static web site served out of a Dallas data center, with a great network connection, from a powerful bare metal machine that did nothing else. Sitting in Austin, it felt instant, equal to localhost speed, until I tried accessing it while traveling, especially overseas.

It's not just geographic latency you're addressing with a CDN, you're also reducing the number of network hops. It's not uncommon to experience higher latency going from SF to San Jose datacenter just because you're on a "wrong" ISP. A good CDN usually has a POP on the same network as you.

I live in Vietnam and frequently give tech advice to people regarding websites they are developing. Most sites on the works fine, but I can tell straight away when someone has hosted their site like you have described - because it will take >5 minutes to load! And they'll be telling me that it's fine, and I have to explain, yes, it's fine if you only want people in the same country as you to access the site. If you want it to work worldwide, you'll have to do better.

Fortunately, these days that just means creating a free Cloudflare account.

Thanks for sharing your perspective.

In your case, are all CDNs equal? Do I just have to throw my content to the biggest provider?

Don't get me wrong. Disenfranchisng non-Western visitors is the last thing I want to do, but the issue is not CDN or not, it's caching content closer to people whose ISPs don't provide sufficient service outside their own borders.

I dislike that CDNs are the only way around this and I feel like it is centralizing Internet access in an unfavorable way.

> In your case, are all CDNs equal?

The big data centers in this region are in Singapore and I expect all CDNs have a presence there, so probably. I haven't exactly done any benchmarking though.

> the issue is not CDN or not, it's caching content closer to people whose ISPs don't provide sufficient service outside their own borders.

How would you do this without a CDN (on a small budget)?

What causes these performance problems? Latency across the globe shouldn't be that bad (200ms or so). Is it limited bandwidth into your country?

Remember that the JS CDN thing started 10+ years ago when internet connections were a lot slower and JQuery was the JS framework and only released one new version per year. That means there's a really good chance another website also used it from the Google CDN, and you're browser cached it forever-ish, no DNS lookup needed.

The other thing to remember is old browsers used to cap the number of connections per domain HTTP 1.1 only supports serial requests, so there were benefits to hosting on multiple domains.

Even today, the big benefit of a CDN domain is that CDNs can host static resources faster and cheaper than your webservers. Yes, you can forward requests from the CDN to your webservers, but it's also one point point of failure. What's interesting is that with a modern, JS-only site, the split becomes API and static JS.

There are situations where you do not want or need a global reach. If you are in ecommerce and your not wanting to ship outside your own country then why have images hosted on CDNs?

Scripts and CSS are (or should be) small compared to the images.

Yet, with the images, you can use mod_pagespeed on the server to replace images with picture source sets, with the server able to detect the bandwidth of the client and their device to serve them highly optimised images. So that means images that look glorious on a 4K screen with a good connection and images that are a bit jaggy for the person on their phone with only 3G.

I am sure that CDNs can do this too and that you can get mod pagespeed to work with CDNs but there is so much that can be done on a server without having to sign up for extra services and their overheads.

As a scrub in this domain. When I use a CDN, I get a network that is cheaper per-GB at delivering content, and is better at delivering content. Far more resources in a CDN are configured to deliver content faster and cheaper than whatever rinky-dink EC2 I've got serving the website.

Just how much JavaScript do you have to use for it to make it a significant difference? If you serve 100k of JS (please don't), at 1 million hits per month you're looking at 100GB. Even at EC2's obscene pricing, this is still just $10/month.

If you're that stingy, why aren't you just putting the entire website behind CloudFlare and calling it a day?

I have a js file that is over 900kb, (nearing a mb)

Given, its for use in embedded webviews of a video game, and it powers like 50 different atomic interfaces via react.

I wasn't aware that CDNs were much cheaper, and am genuinely curious what service you are using at what prices.

When I look at AWS pricing, us-east-1 at < 10TB, I see: EC2 data transfer out to the internet is 9¢/GB, and Cloudfront is 8.5¢/GB for the lowest price class. That's a slight savings, but at 6% I can't justify the effort to switch over on cost alone.

Should I be looking at a different CDN service?

Cloudflare famously charges $0/GB, with some arbitrary restrictions on the way you use their service, and I’ve heard rumors of soft limits on the total amount of bandwidth you can use before they email you to upgrade to a higher plan.

I’ve never used BunnyCDN, but they charge a flat $0.01/GB for North American traffic, and I’ve heard some good things about them.

DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, and some other cloud providers charge $0.01/GB without a CDN, just using their regular servers, but obviously a CDN is more than just a way to save money — it’s a way to lower latency and improve user experience.

The mega clouds (AWS, Azure, and GCP) seem to significantly over-charge for egress bandwidth as a nice profit mechanism, just because they can.

My unpopular opinion is that mega clouds are overrated. They’re fine, but they have a lot of weird gotchas that most people have just accepted as “how the cloud works.”

Vercel is free.

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