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Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

So if I want to migrate off of netlify to something better, where?

Cloudflare. You will get a call if on a free or pro ($25/month) plan [1] if your bandwidth usage is so high it would warrant increasing your plan. Worst case, they turn you off. Preferred over denial of money attack based on your use case. Set and forget after pointing at your origin (time is money).

You'll get a call on any of their plans if your bandwidth usage exceeds certain thresholds, I am assuming your median usage is relatively tame.

Disclosure: Cloudflare enterprise customer, no other affiliation. I don't get anything for saying nice things.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/

You typically can't replace Netlify with Cloudflare. You need something like Github actions with some storage, S3 or something and then one can put Cloudflare in front of it all for caching, DDOS protection and so on.

I believe you can replace most cases (static sites) with Cloudflare Workers [1].

[1] https://workers.cloudflare.com/

Workers run before the cache so I would avoid this for static sites. One can use workers for dynamic routes on a static site though.

Sounds like you're thinking of Cloudflare still as just the DNS/DDoS protection it started out with. I'm not that familiar with Netlify, but just going on your description:

- Cloudflare Pages: https://pages.cloudflare.com/

- Cloudflare R2: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/

For less than 1% of OP's monthly bill, you can build or obtain a more-than-enough server, drop your static files on it, and serve through nginx. And you get to keep it forever; there's no monthly subscription fee!

Seriously, maybe I'm just old, but I look at the pricing of these hip and modern SaaS products for dead simple software and I cannot believe my eyes. The "old fashioned way" works just fine (and has always worked just fine) and is orders of magnitude cheaper.

Hetzner or DigitalOcean with Coolify [0] works great, it's like an open source Heroku that runs on any host, you get git push to deploy, and a bunch of other features built in. It only works on one machine at a time though so it's not like a CDN but for small sites, it's great.

[0] https://coolify.io

I use DigitalOcean to host some things (with my own setup for deployments with git push, because `curl | bash` is not a great way to install/maintain software).

How am I protected against extra charges for traffic?

Same here, using DigitalOcean instead of Vercel to host my Next.js app. I have a billing alert to notify of unexpected bills, but I don't know what DO does if somehow TBs of traffic are sent to my apps or Cloudflare, because DO App Platform actually uses Cloudflare behind the scenes.

I mean you gotta put your server somewhere (I guess hosting it on your connection?)

A lot less than 1%.

But you need a static IP, stable internet, UPS, and permission from your wife to have a 24/7 powered noisy box in a room

I pay less than $5/mth for a VPS with static IP and 1GB/mth transfer. If I get close to any of my CPU/Memory/Disk/Transfer capacity I get a friendly email letting me know that I might want to add more capacity.

I mean, the C10k problem was coined in 1999[0]. A 10W raspberry pi is going to be faster than any server of that day, so it depends on what exactly you are hosting if you need the noisy box.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem

How sensitive are you if you think a rpi is noisy?

You don't need a static IP. You can use dynamic DNS or a free product such as Cloudflare Tunnel.

Dynamic type IP doesn't usually change for no reason, work around whatever instability you have, set BIOS so PC auto-restarts and OS launches apps when failed power returns, get a mini fanless PC which can be easily concealed, and you don't even need to tell anyone who doesn't have a need to know.

Whether that includes your wife or not is up to you ;)

Having built serverless apps and "old-fashioned" apps, I seriously believe the old fashioned way is better.

The best of both worlds is to host on AWS EC2 or a similar product from your web service provider of choice.

EC2 is so much more expensive than a standard VPS from almost any other provider though. If you're not embedded heavily in other AWS products I don't think it's worth bothering with EC2 - LightSail is way more cost effective and gets you most of the features.

I use BunnyCDN to host several sites, they have a minimum cost of $1 per month and I usually pay $1 per month.

I run my sites [0] on Hugo and copy the generated sites (Makefile) to BunnyCDN with their command line tool.

It's a plain CDN, but does include DNS hosting for easy SSL certificates and has scriptable DNS [1] where you can run Javascript for dynamic DNS.

I went with them b/c they are in the EU, but I've stayed because I love them.

[0] e.g. https://www.amazingcto.com/

[1] https://bunny.net/dns/

Looks nice but then so does Netlify at face level! Seems like it is pay as you go, and there is a settable max spend per month.

Does their ddos protection work differently than Netlify and could Bunny ever pull the same stunt with billing?

No they don't do Ddos protection AFAIK.

I think the main difference to me is

  Netlify  $550/TB [0]
  BunnyCDN  $10/TB [1]

You preload your account:

"In order to keep your service online, you are required to keep a positive account credit balance. Our system will automatically send multiple warning emails if your account balance drops beyond a certain point. If you fail to recharge your account, the system will automatically suspend your account"

[0] https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress

[1] https://bunny.net/pricing/

Just checked, you can also set a limit on monthly bandwidth.

"Monthly Bandwidth Limit (GB) - Limits the allowed bandwidth used in a month. If the limit is reached the zone will be disabled. Set to 0 for unlimited."

Thanks!

Love Bunny too, wonderful service and great team. I wish there'd be an easy way to set up auto-deploy to Bunny Edge Storage on GitHub commit (to avoid doing so manually), but I guess it's not to hard to do through GitHub Actions.

Same.

I switched from Bunny to BlazingCDN, with same performance... 1000TB - $0.0025 per Gb And the support helps a lot, they even made the config for Asia for free

https://blazingcdn.com/pricing/

Can't use BlazingCDN because of GDPR.

Hetzner VPS + nginx works fine and goes a looong way. Alternatively, SourceHut pages or GitHub pages is okay too.

If it’s been a while since you did any server work: https://www.dannyvankooten.com/blog/2024/static-site-hosting...

I'm hosting a few large (multiple TB) projects on Cloudflare R2 with no issues for more than a year now. Super happy.

CloudFlare Pages/ Workers is pretty nice

https://render.com/ is free for static sites with custom domain support and SSL included. been happy so far!

used to use s3 for the longest time, but aside from costing a nominal fee, it's so unnecessarily complicated in this day and age.

Just something to keep in mind: this also has about half of additional bandwidth costs (above 100GB) of the reddit post, so in your case you'd be billed for ~$57k or so with similar DDOS. At least they seem to provide monitoring/alerts based on their Security page.

thanks for the heads up, need to do my due diligence here.

edit: refreshing that they highlight baked in ddos protection right up front on their marketing site: https://docs.render.com/ddos-protection

Keep in mind that according to their forum you'll be charged $30/100GB for bandwidth over free allowance of 100GB:

https://community.render.com/t/confused-about-the-free-tier/...

> Exceeding allotted Bandwidth does result in automatic overage charges. $30 for additional 100 GB blocks.

So the same shady pracrice as on Netlify.

wow, thanks for mentioning that, though I'm wondering how this would work, since they didn't ask for any name/billing information at signup...

> used to use s3 for the longest time, but aside from costing a nominal fee, it's so unnecessarily complicated in this day and age

its like 10 minutes of setup tops to host on s3

Not for me. It's always configuration voodoo. i've done it dozens of times and i used to think it's normal developer workflow. now i realize I was putting thumbtacks in my eyes for no good reason.

Creating an s3 bucket is easy enough. but you need to add the policy Json config to allow public access, and it has various versions across time and space. the one that works for me is like 15 years old iono. object resource "//*" something or other.

ok so now you have an s3-east-mybucket.com/index.html, ok custom domain that's route 53 yet more configuration vooodoo to point an s3 website enabled bucket blah blah.

wait! need SSL? oops actually that's cloudfront. need a cloudfront config voodo to point to an s3 config voodoo to your hopefully correctly configured route 53.

are you kidding me, 10 mins? You're a wizard. Now i do git push origin main and my sites up on render.com

yes, you need to spend the time to learn about the environment you are hosting your app in and then suddenly it won't seem like "voodoo" as much. you absolutely can set this up in 10 minutes (probably much quicker if you are adept with various infra tooling). theres even wizard dialogs for most of the things you've described right in the AWS UI nowadays.

That depends on what level of knowledge you are based on. The UX of AWS offers even leading experienced admins and developers some surprising stumbling blocks.

For static sites my choice is usually CloudFlare in front of a S3 bucket. It costs pennies. With cloudflare R2 it might be even easier.

Why not just use Cloudflare Pages?

It wasn’t an option when I setup my S3+cloudflare sites. It sounds like an excellent solution now.

For personal servers you can use the dynamic DNS feature on your modem in combination with Cloudflare if you like doing it at home, if it's for your business you can see if you can afford the €2 per month for Hetzner managed hosting or your local equivalent.

Depending on your use case, Hetzner is as cheap as it gets while retaining high quality.

I've always been a fan of cloudflare or firebase for static sites.

Github works well for me.

If it’s really pure static, github is great because it’s impossible for you to be billed. If you want some functions, Cloudflare free plan is nice because you can configure it to stop operating when the usage limit is reached, or pay $5 a month for more than you’ll likely ever need for a hobby project. Also bandwidth is free.

Do you need to configure Cloudflare to stop operating on limit?

I was thinking they never charge for anything unless you explicitly allowed it.

You configure how it stops, whether the static content is available when the functions quota has been exceeded.

I use AWS, S3, Cloudfront, ACM with a budget alert.

I just migrated some projects to Cloudflare Pages for the time being.

Firebase Hosting is rad.

Github static page.

Infomaniak

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