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Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

They are very likely real and OVH has a very good system. You can thank them for making free DDoS protection mainstream, dragging all other hosts kicking and screaming into providing DDoS protection.

In the past providers like Linode were happy to just null route your IP for several hours/days or charge you thousands to block a small flood.

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> You can thank them for making free DDoS protection mainstream

AWS does charge for WAF and Shield, I believe.

I also remember comparing AWS Lambda at Edge vs Cloudflare Workers (though Lambda allows for longer execution times and generally provides more flexibility like RAM, CPU, Runtimes since it runs on a Linux VM vs V8 Isolates for Workers), costs were something like 10x apart.

Can't wait for WebSockets support for Workers.

> I also remember comparing AWS Lambda at Edge vs Cloudflare Workers ... costs were something like 10x apart.

According to the AWS pricing example[1] 10 million requests per month on Lambda@Edge costs $9.13. The same thing on Cloudflare Workers[2] costs $5.00. So I would expect it to be closer to 2x. Although as you say there's a bit more flexibility with Lambda@Edge so it'll depend on your particular case.

I'm curious if your situation was different somehow that made for such a big cost difference between the two?

[1]https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/#Lambda.40Edge_Pricing [2]https://workers.cloudflare.com/#plans

$5 includes a generous free tier for Workers KV that can hold upto 10MiB of data against a single key. Cloudflare does not charge for bandwidth consumed, I believe. Also, use of Cloudflare's zonal http-cache is free.

I guess, when I compared, I took Lambda@Edge's per second billing into consideration and not per 50ms (which brings down the RAM usage cost from $62.52 to $3.13 and total usage from $68.52 to $9.13).

What really sealed the deal for me was the very low cold-start times with Workers. I'm not aware of recent improvements with Lambda@Edge, but the last time I tried them, it wasn't uncommon to hit 100ms+ start times.

That's interesting, thanks. I haven't really used Cloudflare Workers for much myself so it's interesting to hear folks' comparisons.

One more thing, I am not sure if Lambda@Edge charges based on wall-time or cpu-time. Workers' 50ms is cpu-time only and not wall-time. You could, in theory, spend 30s waiting for a fetch to return as awaiting on the network doesn't count against a Workers' 50ms cpu-time limit.

Ref: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/limits/

It wasn't just Linode (a provider that's generally much cheaper than OVH), but high end providers like Softlayer too (and, as far as I know, still are)

SoftLayer, now IBM Cloud, does not provide “DDOS Protection”. Their filtering service is only up to a certain amount, iirc max 5.5 Gbit or something like that. It is absolute trash and pretty much kills all traffic legitimate or not. If you’re filtered for more than 6-8 hours, they will just nullroute the IP. I’ve had the misfortune of hitting this every few months and it’s a major headache. If they remove you from the nullroute, and you land back on it, they won’t remove you again for 24 hours. A few months ago we hit a bug with their detection where it considered outbound to be the same as inbound, and produced some wildly off base numbers that made no sense. We’re not a small account, I’d say medium sized probably at this point, but I wanted to hop a plane to Dallas and strangle the techs there. It’s really gone downhill since IBM acquired them, and I dread to see how Red Hat fares...

If you ask for any estimated traffic size so you can go to a service that does do filtering for a living, they won’t give you that stating “nobody does”. It took a lot of time getting numbers out of them, and that finally finding a top level employee through our account manager was what led to them going “oh yikes, yeah something is off.” Sigh.

How is Linode “much cheaper than OVH”? Their margins are probably way higher.

Linode's origin is as a VPS provider. OVH's is as a dedicated server provider. OVH's top server is twice the cost of Linode's and their cheapest is 5x the price (10 vs ~50).

Cheapest OVH dedi I see is the KS-1 for 3.99eur, which is less than the cheapest Linode VPS. OVH also doesn’t try to nickel-and-dime you by charging for data transfer.

I wouldn’t recommend the cheapest Kimsufi offerings though, something like the SYS-WS-1 goes for $33 and is easily comparable with Linode offerings priced at multiple times that.

OVH has a VPS product that’s far cheaper than what Linode offers, but I can’t speak to the quality of that offering.

Comparing prices for bare metal with prices for shared infrastructure is pretty much useless though.

Why is that?

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