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Comment by MVorlm | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting service! As an aside, I would love to know how someone can afford to run "30+" edge servers for a personal SaaS project. It seems that there will be a paid plan — but for such a niche service I wonder if it's sustainable long term. I ask because:

1) I may be looking for static content cdn(s) in the future for a personal project (would love recommendations!)

2) I would love to know how much money people are spending infrastructurally (at least in the beginning) to kickstart their projects

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Good question MVorlm, thanks!

1) Static CDNs

We live in a wonderful time where CDNs are essentially free for small projects. I use CloudFlare for almost everything, simply because it’s so easy to set up, it gives you a free SSL endpoint, it allows you to use naked domain names (faviconkit.com instead of www.faviconkit.com) and it just works well. The HTML is hosted on Github Pages, which is also free.

1a) Number of edge servers

CloudFlare: 151 https://www.cloudflare.com/network/ CloudFront: 117 https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/details/ KeyCDN: 30+ https://www.keycdn.com/global-cdn Google Cloud CDN: 90+ https://cloud.google.com/cdn/

There are a few unique aspects of Favicon Kit specifically - the setup here is a tiny little bit more "sophisticated", which is why I chose Key CDN for the API itself.

2) Money spent on infrastructure (at least in the beginning)

+ Favicon Kit used to run on Heroku until recently, so I spent a few bucks on their hosting and CI plan. (It now runs on AWS Lambda) + I have a paid Github account. + CloudFlare is free. + KeyCDN so far cost me < 100€

Can you say a little more about the reason you chose KeyCDN over CloudFlare or the other providers. What features are you using?

Sure!

Favicons change very, very rarely, so they are perfect candidates for caching; fast extraction and caching are core features of Favicon Kit.

It was mainly the fact that Cloudflare does not cache by MIME type, but by file extension (https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-W...) and/or would require page rules (https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500320685...) to honor cache-control headers. (It‘s been a while since I’ve made that decision, so I hope I'm remembering the reasons correctly!)

KeyCDN was simple to set up and their pricing was equally simple and very reasonable, so I ended up staying with them.

I hope this answers your question, JohannesH!

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