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Comment by cmer | Hacker News Reader

We switched from Cloudfront to Fastly and couldn't be happier. These guys are awesome and the product is top notch. I highly recommend Fastly.

We weren't too impressed with Cloudfront. The performance was all over the place and they provide no insight for cache hits/misses.

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I actually looked at Fastly just a few days ago. Unfortunately their custom SSL fees are a bit high. But seems really nice and will definitely do a write-up if we try them.

On price Fastly has copied every CloudFront price to the cent. I seems they differentiate on statistics and rapid purging (their purported competitive edge). However, for most any application, with proper version naming of resources, purges should not be an issue, unless you've got hard coded references to those resources.

Though they have a $50 minimum also (unlike CloudFront), presumably as customers spending less than that are too expensive to support.

Except that the service they offer is much superior and are open to a conversation about pricing if you're a big enough client.

The rapid purge is probably inspired by the requirements for a large, popular wiki. The Fastly team comes from Wikia.

When the entire page is static, but changes must be communicated everywhere instantly, rapid purging is the answer.

I'd highly recommend Fastly too. Great product and great support. The guys there are doing an impressive job.

I've not used Fastly, but I know how competent the guys behind it are, and I'd start any search there...

We had the same experience: CloudFront to Fastly.

Fastly has a great CDN service, beutiful origin hosting for a Rails or Python app, and customizable output filters (gzip? yes, please) and customizable cache config.

Can't recommend them enough.

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