Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

I love CloudFlare, but wow they have a tremendous amount of control over the sites they proxy. While the folks in this thread have done a fine job explaining why this wouldn’t work or save money, I am curious if there are any legit alternatives to a major CDN. It seems like an open/community approach could be viable if people where to pool resources for edge servers and bandwidth bills. It would take auditable infrastructure throughput. I know, blockchain... pitchfork... but maybe CDN is an actually awesome use case for a distributed system. If torrents weren’t the charred earth of the DRM wars, it could probably work as well if it caching could be optimized well enough through the entire route.

It’s hard to imagine that any distributed solution could compete on first byte and overall latency; CloufFlare is too amazing at that. I really wish you could just check out my site to your device and receive a stream of updates, maybe as a micropayment per update for web publishers. That way content procurement is a one-time affair for the consumer, and ongoing consumption is billable in bites/bytes, not by monthly subscriptions. What if you could distribute source binaries for micropayments as well, funding bandwidth and development efforts with fees associated with actual use? Damn, there I go sounding like a blockchain pitch again.

I see the publishing industry running towards membership models and quickly going to be warring over a diminishing wallet share. Apple now looms large. Something has to be done, or FANG efforts to ‘help the news industry’ will result in greater control of media consumption at every level. Bloody megacorps deciding how to optimize their Q4 with our brains.

Does working with a commercial CDN the best for the web we want to give to our grandkids?

Seeing a big player showing up and offering ‘free protection’ reminds me of The Godfather. And how gets hurt when they need to raise Series F?

If you don't trust the commercial CDNs to not mess with your stuff, I don't think you can trust random volunteers either. Maybe if you serve your dynamic content directly, and use http subresource integrity to reference the volunteer CDN?

Building a basic CDN is fairly simple, although doing it well is a challenge. You need to get cache servers near users, ideally in ISP networks, but connected nearby internet exchanges works well enough until you have enough traffic to work with ISPs. It might not be the most cost effective, but the cloud providers have decent coverage, so you don't have to figure out on the ground operations around the world (although coverage in Africa is slim).

Assuming you have the servers everywhere, they need decent connectivity to your origins, at least if you have a lot of changing content. If connectivity is bad, you may want to route static, cacheable data to local servers, and dynamic pages to your origins; but it connectivity is good, you might want to proxy dynamic traffic to get local termimation of tcp / tls.

Then you need to direct users to the best cache for them, or at least a good one. There are lots of DNS providers that can do this, the concept is simple though, there might be something off the shelf to get started with. The cool kids use Anycast for this, but I don't know how accessible that with just cloudservers.

A lot of what’s being described here is in IPFS, including distributed hosting of your content, and a distributed name resolution system.

Which is also supported by cloudflare so a bit of both worlds: https://www.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/

I know people working on this, I don’t think they launched yet but yes it is relatively easier eg compared to filecoin which has harder requirements than just a cache, but its not trivial and the business model is not trivial either.

I just wish they offer all of their services and features in a Pay as You Go Sub Brand.

Say more about this. One of the things we did early was decide that everyone hated their cell phone company because they charged on an unpredictable, metered rate. So we made the rates flat. It's 8 years later. The world has changed. What would you rather have metered than flat/tiered fee?

Personal Opinion Only.

It most has to do with freemium. Cloudflare started in the era where many were perfectly happy with "free" and had not much thought about it. Today many finally realise "You are the Product if you are not paying for it.", even if it was for upsell. But before this phase was coined or widely known, I was very wary of anything that is "free". And one reason why I was sceptics as well when Domain Registration are operated in similar fashion, I would much rather knowingly that Cloudflare made $1 - $2 per Domain per year than something being subsidise one way or another.

It also give you choices, instead of going Business or Enterprise for Minimum cache expiry time, or other features. Customer gets to decide what they want. Pricing is crystal clear and there is no need to play guess games or contact sales. Especially when everyone today are now very accustom to AWS.

I don't know how many are in the same bloat. But judging Business from other CDN competitor I guess there are few who prefer to be on metered plan. That is why I suggested a Sub Brand. Another Services offering using the same Network.

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