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Comment by redm | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN. I created Fast.io as a workflow tool for file hosting. Instead of pushing files to S3, and configuring CloudFront, I wanted more of a "syncing" experience, like Dropbox. The other problem I wanted to solve was log parsing; in other words, I didn't want to log parse. So Fast.io parses the logs for me and sends them right to Google Analytics.

It works as you would expect, and supports files up to 1GB at a price lower than S3/CloudFront.

It's been a long time in the making, I hope you like it!

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This is pretty useful! Putting blinders on and working with a project on my laptop and knowing the folder it's in is automagically getting synced with an actual CDN as well as everything being updated in real-time as I make changes??? Sounds pretty sweet. On my last project I wasted an entire damn day dealing with setting up GH-Pages and another project with Coudflair, a regular hosting company and a few tools to automate my workflow. I really like that all of this is out of the box in this product!

I find it at the very least strange that this CDN gets submitted to HN twice today, and you post the exact same extremely positive comment on both submissions.

Hey there, a long story short, it was accidentally launched on PH a day early so we were running around a bit crazy earlier today. I submitted it earlier as a Launch with a comment/copy and paste but realized it should have been a Show. I also wanted to write the comment myself instead of the copy/paste.

Thanks for your interest!

You find it strange that this was reposted and when I saw it I didn't want to re-write a totally different comment once I saw it? I find this service useful. I mean what's not exciting and useful about hosting a site from within your personal dropbox on your laptop? Also, I find it very strange that you have nothing better to do than police HN.

> Also, I find it very strange that you have nothing better to do than police HN.

Your comment would have been just fine without that last sentence.

(I'm still in the process of waking up and so I have nothing better to do, in case you find this comment strange.)

How is this different from Netlify? I've used Netlify as a CDN before, which syncs from git repository. I'm trying to understand when I'd use this service.

Hi, a good question, I had a chance to attend the latest JAMstack event in SF, and Netlify is a great product. We aren't trying to compete with them. At a technical level, Netlify is a "build" up platform, and we are a CDN down platform.

Netlify takes a snapshot from VCS and performs a build process. This is imaged into a container and then Netlify has their "CDN" in front of it.

Fast.io is an origin, so processing is largely event driven, pulled on demand, cached on our L2 cache, and pushed to the edge. It's a more traditional CDN model.

There are lots of practical differences. 1) We don't have a build system. 2) We have much larger file limits, up to 20GB. 3) We focus on object analytics, not through our own UI, but by integrating with Mixpanel and Google Analytics. 4) Netlify optimizes content in the build process, we optimize as data passes through. The list goes on.

Netlify also charges a lot (the price just went up) $1000 for an "Enterprise" CDN. We are built around them.

More practically, we focus on object storage and distribution, which is great for files but not for site builds.

It's been a long day, I hope that answered your question.

I'll do my best to answer your question in a different way.

What differentiates Fast.io from Netlify:

1. Simplicity: GitHub + Cloud Storage integration allows an extremely simple workflow (for technical and non-technical people alike). This enables us to handle files up to 1GB each, unlike Netlify which maxes out at 10MB unless you add Large Media support which modifies your Git repo.

2. Enterprise CDN included with Free: We work with CloudFlare and Akamai to provide their full Enterprise capabilities to all users, including Free. Netlify only provides a real CDN to their Enterprise customers - they call it "Enterprise CDN".

3. Analytics: We integrate directly with Google Analytics (and future MixPanel) directly from the CDN - so you can get complete analytics data on even direct file downloads - no javascript required. Unlike Netlify who only gives their own analysis tools, with us you can leverage Google and MixPanel’s much more powerful interfaces and tools.

Most of the same can be said for all other competitors in the static hosting space - and yes, simplicity is probably our true key differentiator, especially compared to Amazon S3, GCP, or Azure.

We think we’re a great developer tool, but we may be better positioned to offer powerful features to novice developers or non-developers (marketing people, designers, etc..).

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