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Comment by porker | Hacker News Reader

> - Fastly: the most technically advanced CDN, but also one of the most expensive ones (there is a reason why StackExchange and Reddit moved from Cloudflare to Fastly)

Especially with the crazy SSL pricing. I appreciate there are technical difficulties, but LetsEncrypt has been out what - 2 years? And Fastly still want $100/month for a shared certificate.

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Yup, that was a major barrier for us. Worth noting that they charge this much even if you want to use a Let's Encrypt cert [0].

[0] https://support.fastly.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/36004016...

Fastly also don’t support proxying WebSockets. They told us we should switch to long polling which would have driven up our costs with them significantly since they charge per request — funny how that works.

Still, definitely the most interesting CDN if you can’t do your own thing. Network still isn’t where Akamai or EdgeCast are. Lots of good people there, though.

And if anyone needs more than just proxying WebSockets, there's Fanout Cloud which can manage WebSockets without requiring 1:1 connections with the origin.

Seems like a pretty clever way to filter out cheapskate customers. I don't think most large organizations would care about that kind of rate

It's less a filter but more of a tack on. What I mean is that if you're already on Fastly and find their features compelling, $100 for a certificate is nothing and generates huge margins for Fastly. It's a bit like the BMW/German car model: their base price is not too bad but if you want even the most basic features the mark ups are insane.

Even worse when you consider that their biggest competitor gives SSL away to free tier customers.

I happen to like VCL and what you can do with it. I would rather Fastly got coverage for what's possible, rather than Cloudflare Workers getting all the blog articles.

But without a cheap/free tier for smaller projects (and all my tech skills have been honed on small projects and then applied to large clients) they are not going to attract that coverage.

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