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Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

Fastly's bandwidth prices are high to me: $0.12-$0.28/GB is 2007 rates for transit. Perhaps this is why when GitHub pages started capping bandwidth to lower limits they had also switched to Fastly? For a comparison, I pay less than $0.01/GB for a CDN right now, and the price of transit on average drops 40%/year so even that's above market rate now.

A lot of people (including Cloudflare) just give it out for free, making this really a space for enterprise plays, which at their size, have the clout to push for better rates across many similar competitors, or just running their own infrastructure.

I honestly just don't get the value add here. It really doesn't feel like an IPO play.

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That's the card rate. Their bigger customers aren't paying that.

It's part of why I don't get it. Large companies have multiple competitors to negotiate with, driving down prices (and this does not look to change anytime soon, it's dropping 40%/year for transit).

We're talking about an S-1 here. Where's that growth going to come from? Cannibalizing Akamai is not a long term IPO strategy.

At my previous job, we had Fastly as a potential new CDN provider set up against our existing CDN provider and two other new potentials. After a few rounds of calls for bids, Fastly won out.

Based on my experience with the other providers they were also, by a large margin, the most modern - it felt like moving from a 2008 integration to a modern, fully RESTful API with great documentation and decent UI.

This is all anecdotal, but they did combine a great technical platform with great support. If transit prices are the same or similar for all providers in that size category, they have to fight on features and support instead.

They won based on what?

I agree re: cannibalizing Akamai and I don't have any inside knowledge at all, just a fan of theirs and the last two companies I've worked for have both been customers. There's the security/WAF stuff that could be hugely lucrative for the larger customers that decide that's a priority. There's also whatever future potential edge computing/serverless ends up having. They're already kind of perfectly positioned to ramp that up if they want to.

I think the easiest short term play is the loooong tail of CDN business that's out there that never would've bothered with Akamai because it's too expensive. Their partnership and bizdev folks are really smart about reaching out to small and mid market PaaS providers to set up coverage for all of the sites under their management. It only takes a few of them to take off in their niche to add up to a fairly significant amount of revenue.

unrelated: I'm a fan of Neocities, thank you for that :thumbsup:

Thanks, appreciate it. :)

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