Discussion

Dropping Cloudflare for bunny.net

mhitza: Unfortunately it doesn't offer free hosting for hobbyists. Even for superficial traffic you'll have pay 1 euro a month (plus VAT).Not many DNS management providers (that I'm aware of, please correct me) support CNAME flattening. That is having your A record point to a CNAME.Every time I purge the pull zone cache, I do it twice, cause once from my CI isn't enough. My CI does individual page cache invalidation during deployment, but there needs to be some kind of delay (with no feedback) when assets are distributed across.

turblety: I switched a year ago and have been absolutely loving them. Not just because we can support a EU based CDN, but their Magic Containers are amazing. I can have global instantly scalable API's that cost me barely $1 a month until used.

maxdo: make Europe great again, and no, this is so different from any other nationalist moves :)

swiftcoder: Surely by definition, being pro-EU is automatically anti-nationalism (at least for everyone inside the EU)?

BarryMilo: Other commenters laughing at you for the price... It's not about the price it's about the barrier. Even if I love a service, I won't get very many people to try it if they need to enter a credit card.

FryHigh: I had to move to Bunny.net after Cloudflare disabled my homepage following a malicious report, despite me being a paying customer for several years. I also never received a response to my appeal.I’ve now been with Bunny.net for over a year and have been very happy with the service.

tao_oat: I tried to move my sites to Bunny Edge Scripting and found the experience mostly poor, unfortunately. A lot of failures without error logs, and purging the pull zone cache only seemed to work sometimes. A shame because I like their offering otherwise.

evolve2k: I’ve mainly been using cloudflare for the very excellent (and free) premium DNS offering.Easy upload of bind test files Flattened CNAME to support naked domains Robust free role based permissions to add other pplAnyone have suggestions for moving a stack of domains, many being little community and hobby projects away from cloudflare for a small overall price. Agency pricing like migadu offers for email on custom domains is what I have in mind.https://www.migadu.com/pricing/

evolve2k: I should add a friend has recommended DNsimple.com and I’ve previously found their service to be excellent.https://dnsimple.com/50 cents per domain per month 10 cents per million queriesThat’s prob cheap enough to support lots of little hobby sites and bigger traffic sites likely have some budget.

ben8bit: We use them for a couple of things - very happy. I think probably the best reason (other than service robustness): support. CloudFlare is great until it's not, and you aren't paying $$$ for enterprise support. This is probably one of the most underrated reasons to switch to any lesser known (but still rock solid) infra services. UpCloud too - great support!

moralestapia: Nice ad.>One of my biggest concerns though is around how easily I could become heavily dependent on this one single company that then can decide to cut me off [...]How does switching to Bunny make a difference?It would be super nice to have a setup that uses multiple CDNs w/ automatic failover.

Bender: It would be super nice to have a setup that uses multiple CDNs w/ automatic failover.Doable, but that removes all the free tiers of all the CDN's. AFAIK they all require an enterprise account to keep using ones own DNS and their own GSLB DNS failover. There are probably a few exceptions and one could maybe make something of that but I don't know which ones are the exceptions.

bakugo: What other CDNs even have decent free tiers besides Cloudflare?

PUSH_AX: This has to be an ad right? Affiliate link in the blog, non sensical reasoning for switching (single point of failure to... another single point of failure) etc

pdimitar: Man, come on now, it's 1.20 EUR a month.

mhitza: Of course it's nothing, but it's also not a set it an forget kind of thing, which in many ways for hobbyists is why cloudflare/github pages are nice.

fourside: I get that credit cards are a barrier of entry but I’m more willing to give providers a break now that AI agents make it much easier to abuse free tiers. It’s also harder for smaller companies to offer free tiers. If we want a more diverse set of service providers we as customers need to be willing to accept some trade-offs.

corford: Second DNSimple. Cheap to start and lots of nice features/support if you grow e.g. terraform provider, an acme.sh plugin, Okta support etc.

lpcvoid: I am pro-EU and anti-nationalist. This works because the EU is a collection of states.

noir_lord: I'm pro-EU and my country is no longer in the EU (annoyingly).It's not perfect but it's better than the alternatives and we really need a power bloc (even if currently only economic) that isn't the US and China.Alternatives to US big tech are always welcome.

vvpan: I do not understand what it is about Cloudflare. Especially for a blog post - won't pretty much anything do?

hobofan: It's also a barrier for education.Almost all technological choices I made as a teen were driven by "what hosting can I get for free, as my parents sure as hell won't put down their payment information for that". Back then that usually meant PHP and a max. 50MB MySQL.

Lihh27: heh one bad report gets action. years as a paying customer get you silence. ugly asymmetry.

kugelblitz: I use bunny.net for CDN and DNS.I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".I'd rather have a low fee now, a change from $2 to $3 is more likely and that's fine for me. But from free to not free is risky for me.I also like smaller, independent-ish ompanies that actually care about developers. That's why I use bunny.net, transistor.fm, Plausible Analytics.

akdev1l: >I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".You can just move to another provider at that point. At least when it comes to CDN and DNS there’s literally no vendor lock-in.You can grab your dns records export them to csv and import somewhere else easily and a CDN is just a file server so you can just give your files to someone else easily.

glhaynes: Can anyone say why this is being downvoted? Seems like it makes sense to me, but this isn't my area of expertise.

nixosbestos: I used to handwave cloud portability. Turns out when you're shipping things and need extra services and you have deadlines, you build against the platform. I think the GP comment was probably expressing wariness of the free cloudflare tier that entices you to build against their APIs and their product shape in a way that inevitably locks you in. Sure, you could migrate, but that's expensive.

Manchitsanan: I'm currently running a SaaS on Cloudflare Workers + Pages. The developer experience is genuinely good, deploying serverless functions and static sites from the same repo has been seamless.But I hit a real issue recently: CDN edge caching served stale HTML after a deploy, and the service worker cached the bad response. Took a CDN purge from the dashboard to fix. The debugging experience when things go wrong at the edge is painful, you're always guessing which cache layer is the problem.That being said, the free tier is hard to beat for getting started. Workers, Pages, KV, R2 — you can run a full production app at near-zero cost until you hit scale. Not sure if Bunny offers that.

Sammi: Yeah ran into that too, and found someone else that wrote a script for it, so we're not alone: https://bash.cyberciti.biz/web-server/linuxunix-bash-shell-s...

samlinnfer: I do have a question, is it even possible to have a CDN set up where they don't MITM and strip your TLS and re-encrypt or are we just picking which jurisdiction gets to inspect your traffic?

ossa-ma: Cloudflare's biggest benefit is the wrangler cli which when paired with claude code means that you can completely handoff setup/debugging/analysis.Some of you may be skeptical about this but it allows for much easier management when working on multiple SaaS/hobby projects/personal tools.

jtbaker: DB seems like the main shortcoming in the stack for them. I don't want to deal with the limitations of D1. Seems like a serverless postgres setup a la Neon/Supabase would be a slam dunk.

WilcoKruijer: They have Durable Objects which should be enough for most use cases (it’s SQLite with no limitations). Have you tried that?

sassymuffinz: I use bunny as an image serving and video streaming across multiple projects and it is excellent, never had an issue with it.They recently upgraded the player for streaming media, we use in one instance for tutorial videos, that apparently adds some missing accessibility features. All we needed to do was adjust the embed URL structure we were using and all set.

tambre: Seemingly lacks IPv6 though? Cloudflare requires you to pay them and make an explicit effort to disable IPv6. Sad to see it not enabled by default on Bunny.

sylens: I would probably switch off Cloudflare if I didn't also make use of their Cloudflare Tunnels service for sharing some stuff in a way that doesn't require me to punch a hole in my home network. I realize Pangolin and such also exist, but it's nice to get it for free

smartbit: IMHO main benefit of bunny.net is that as an Slovenian company they adhere to the GDPR, no GAG orders, and offer an Data Processing Agreement (DPA) when Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is involved.See https://bunny.net/gdpr/. Also noticed this:While uncommon, bunny.net also provides a way to block users from the EU from accessing your content altogether by using our traffic manager tools if you do not wish to serve users from the European Union.

starwatch: I've used DO's quite a bit. I'm a big fan... however I find the database latency pretty hard to deal with. In the past 6 months I've seen upwards of 30s for little side projects running tiny (100's of kb) databases. Sometimes it's lightning fast... sometimes it's a disaster.As a consequence I've had to build quite defensively - adopting a PWA approach - heavy caching and background sync. My hope is that latency improves over time because the platform is nice to work with.

mannanj: R2 is pretty darn hard to beat. No egress, and only like $.57 per million read operations. If you're running a video streaming use case (and not using terabytes and caching or abusing your bandwidth) I found no one else compares.Does anyone have thoughts or disagree on this in terms of pricing and cost effectiveness?