Switching to BunnyCDN in Less Than 2 Hours
jonathan-frere.com
jonathan-frere.com
> BunnyCDN was pretty consistently returning my blog post a few hundred milliseconds faster than Cloudflare
Makes me think that author's CF was misconfigured. Unless you're in a zone with really bad interconnects, like Brazil, or African locations, multiple hundreds of milliseconds shouldn't be possible as the baseline, much less as the difference in the saved latency. (I'm assuming the author talks about a single blog post request)
So, don't expect a 100ms+ improvement.
If the author is a Telekom customer, then they would absolutely see 100ms+ improvements.
This has been my general experience with cloudflare. Their free plan is abysmally slow. And even their Pro plans add significant (30ms+) overhead to requests.
i.e. Cloudflare is paying and needs you (the customer) to cover the cost.
People often misconfigure things by pointing their domain to netlify's IP with an A entry, but this is a user problem, not a netlify problem.
I'm sure their builds/functions run in a single region but not static files
For the a CNAME record (e.g. wwww) it can be pointed to their CDN.
I think if you use Netlify DNS for your domain, then you can point A records to their CDN because it’s an alias at that point. Like, A record aliases on AWS Route53.
Tableau will receive your personal, billing and account consumption details.
MixPanel will receive your personal account details as well as information.
Active Campaign will receive your personal, billing, and account consumption information.
I like the bunny policy more. It is more transparent.
But still good to know if someone pick a service with this intention: "I’ve been looking at European alternatives to my current hosting situation, which is Cloudflare."
If things were perfect you only need 1 layer of security. Things aren't perfect, that doesn't mean we should just give up and have no security, we have multiple layers of good security as while it's not perfect, it's better than nothing.
I'm partial to aiming for perfection — when there's time for it — after having been the person paying down the tech debt across different domains (i.e. untangle spaghetti code to unravel subtle logic errors, fix them, and write down documentation).
But I agree that sometimes you just need to ship a workable solution ASAP... I am of the opinion that that should be an exception, and that it isn't a sustainable modus operandi.
> How does bunny.net comply with GDPR?
> bunny.net is fully committed to complying with the GDPR. We have overhauled our user Privacy & Data policy and taken steps to ensure no personally identifiable data is stored from your users that access your services through bunny.net by anonymizing any data that could be used to directly or indirectly identify a user. [..]
Looks like they share personal data of Bunny customers but not the users of the customer's services.
R2 is cheaper though if you storage cost is less than your bandwidth cost, and B2 has a feature to automatically expire items which depending on your design might make it more efficient.
Be wary of that scenario, it happens quite often if you observe cloudflare’s reddit sub. I think most folks are ok paying for stuff , aws being 10x more expensive wouldnt be so successful if people didnt like paying.
But predictability is important, and cloudflare salesmen can tend to be a bit unpredictable and unprofessional and extensively attempt to use all sorts of pressure tactics to reach their sales quota, so be careful.
I’m saying it as someone who extensively uses Cloudflare Workers and pay for their monthly subscriptions.
I've started switching a few sites from Cloudflare to Bunny and the experience has been great so far. Bunny offers custom name servers as well, so if you can setup glue records with your domain registrar, it's easy enough to have custom nameservers, DNS and CDN hosted with Bunny. Cheap as chips and great performance so far.
I'm looking for a decent alternative to ReCaptcha or Turnstile but haven't found one yet that has easy integration (form builders etc.)
My move away from US providers isn't in protest - it's just risk avoidance. The unpredictable nature of the current administration reduces the attractiveness of using US based providers.
Previously, the friction of using a service with slightly rougher edges would have tipped the scales against it. Now, it seems we have a kind of patriotism emerging in our purchase decisions.
Ultimately, it should give us all more choice through strengthened competition.
Bunny doesn’t have a ton of rough edges to begin with, but I do have some easily addressed pet peeves here and there.
I’ve heard of a few US tech businesses voting for stability with their wallets and shifting to foreign service providers because of the instability here in the states. Some regulated industries will not have that luxury of course.
It means all the data captured in the EU is governed by EU data protection / ePrivacy etc regulations and the CLOUD Act doesn’t apply
Whereas a US CDN vendor is captured by requirements the CLOUD Act and so there’s no guarantee of privacy for EU site visitors
I used to consult for a Canadian firm. Their sales folks complained that prospective accounts from outside the US would often include in their negotiations something to the effect of “you need to service our account through a non-US entity.” This firm had no non-Canadian entity.
But it was a very well known tech firm, so the assumption was that it was American.
Turned out the objections from prospects got a lot more strenuous (read: deals from non-US prospects not closing) when the firm’s cloud services were only available through AWS in the US.
The first annoyance is that CloudFlare requires that you use their DNS servers, seems unnecessary to someone who isn't worried about being DDoS'ed, but okay, fine, I'll move one of my secondary domains (a .net) over to them.
I export my DNS Zone from Azure, try import it to CloudFlare and it can't understand the format since it's apparently not a proper BIND format. It's less than a dozen records so I just manually capture them, even though I find the UI for capturing DNS records clunkier than I would expect it to be.
Then I want to update my domain's NS records to point to CloudFlare's servers. My domain is currently an "App Service Domain" which is essentially Azure's DNS registrar offering (they're actually re-selling Wild West Domains services, which I think is GoDaddy) and it turns out it's not possible to update the NS records on Azure. At this point I figure the easiest thing to do is transfer the domain to CloudFlare as the registrar.
This is where CloudFlare has a total stuff up in their systems. Under the "Transfer Domains" section of their dashboard, it would only show "You currently have no domains available for transfer. Follow these instructions to initiate a transfer with the current registrar".
I look at the linked document, manage to get an auth code from Azure for a domain transfer. Still, the "Transfer Domains" screen shows the same thing. I check everything I can, I've captured the domain information on my CloudFlare account (showing a status of "Invalid nameservers", as expected), I check who.is and there is no indication that the domain is locked in any way, still, the "Transfer Domains" doesn't show my domain. I ask ChatGPT and it mentions it can sometimes take a few hours to show, 4 hours later it's still not showing.
I open a ticket and after a bit of back and forth they say the problem is that the "domain is not active", I tell them that to my knowledge everything is active with my domain and I ask them to tell me where I can see this status showing where the domain is "not active" and they tell me it's the status for the domain on the CloudFlare dashboard. Which (presumably) is due to my not having updated the NS records to point to CloudFlare, which I actually mentioned in an earlier email to them is not possible with Azure as the registrar, which is why I was trying to transfer my domain to CloudFlare!
In summary, it's impossible to onboard to CloudFlare if your domain is presently registered with Azure, their "smart" UI doesn't make it possible. I have had to transfer it to our Namecheap account which (as I would have expected on CloudFlare), simply allowed me to enter my domain name and the auth code on their "transfer your domain" page and now the transfer is in progress.
As a related aside, the reason I'm moving from Azure Front Door to CloudFlare is because despite a months long support ticket with Azure, they are not interested in solving the problem of cold cache downloads through their CDN being ridiculously slow, like < 2MB/s (< 16Mbps). I did a test by provisioning a VM with Azure in the South Africa North data center, then via Front Door requested a file hosted with Blob Storage also in the South Africa North data center, and the initial download was < 2MB/s while immediately after it was > 100MB/s (i.e. once the cache was no longer cold). The cold cache speed is less bad (but still not great) if you're doing a set up with everything in West Europe but we've had complaints from European customers in some countries of slow speeds even with West Europe as the source of the data, so I can only surmise that Azure Front Door is just generally terrible at serving files which are not yet cached.
> If you are on a Free or Pro plan, full setup is the only one available. This is the recommended and most common option.
That means to use this partial setup you need to be on at least the Business plan, which is $200/month when billed anually ($250 monthly).
Feel free to ask any questions.
I might not be brave enough to stop using CF, but people who do benefit everyone.