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Comment by sunshine_reggae | Hacker News Reader

> We can’t think of any good reason to do without [CDNn]

CDNs are another way to track everybody. So privacy is an excellent reason for not using a CDN.

It's also an extra point of failure, an extra account to manage, etc. I have seen plenty of low-traffic Rails (and other) apps where neither hosting cost nor performance would be significantly improved by adding a CDN.

I'll add cache invalidation to the list of reasons not to use a CDN. Its a solvable problem, but I've more than once seen irritating issues caused by something getting cached in the CDN layer and loading the wrong resources.

Or simpler, why do you need a CDN? It's rarely worth the additional work (setup + deployment) when most websites are not limited by bandwidth for assets.

If you're serving assets directly from S3 (or even from nginx) you're exposed to a "denial of wallet" attack, given the price markup on outbound networking.

You're answering "Why do you need CDN?" with "Because I'm on AWS"

Their point stands: if you don't have a reason to use a CDN, don't use a CDN

So you have 10 scripts on your page, and you put them in 5 different hosts.

What does the waterfall on that look like? You're probably talking about a web app that transfers 2.6mb to the user who only wants to read 78 bytes of text. And your primary concern is the markup on outbound networking? Don't design crap pages and outbound networking isn't a problem. Most of the data transfer is fluff nobody wants or needs anyway.

You built the website! Now you don't think it's worth sending to the user? Or did you maybe go overboard when you were adding things to it?

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