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I decided to check in on my bandwidth usage on a CDN on one of my higher volume projects. I'm going over my 1 TB limit each month, but they roll over your non-usage over the course of the year so I'm still okay.
But this prompted me to check in on what the next tier of the service would cost since clearly I'm about to need to update. Currently I'm paying about $69 a YEAR for 1 TB a month. They've jumped up to $79 or so per MONTH now... That's something like a 13x price growth for them. Good for them!
This is MaxCDN, by the way. Good for them. The market sustained it and it's comparable to other CDN prices, I checked.
So then I went to check my server, which is a Knownhost VPS-4, and realized they give me 11 TB per month!
I was so busy worried about page speed that by the time bandwidth became the issue I didn't realize I was expected to pay absurd amounts for 1/11th the amount of bandwidth.
To double the pain in the ass, setting up an SSL certificate on a CDN is a pain. Let's Encrypt is rendered useless unless you want to intervene every 90 days to reupload your certificate to the CDN. And even then you still have to use their cruddy shared certificate for the CDN to be secured.
So it seems like the problem is solved. I can save up to $1000 a year, have about 10x the bandwidth for that much less, AND be able to Let's Encrypt with a cron job for renewal every 90 days or whatever. I may lose a 200ms of page speed around the US and more globally, but going HTTPS will likely make up for any long-tail loss.
That's my rant. Has anyone gone from using a CDN to not using one? Does anyone despise them? Does anyone pay the rates these days to keep using them? It seems like it only makes a lot of sense for magazine style sites. eCommerce and the rest still rely on the main server.
So by the time I pay for 25 TB of data on the CDN it's going to cost me something like $1200 a month, versus switching over to a dedicated server with SSD's and 26 TB for $350 or so... CDN's seem to be pricing themselves out of the market and will have to come back down to reality soon.
</rant>
But this prompted me to check in on what the next tier of the service would cost since clearly I'm about to need to update. Currently I'm paying about $69 a YEAR for 1 TB a month. They've jumped up to $79 or so per MONTH now... That's something like a 13x price growth for them. Good for them!
This is MaxCDN, by the way. Good for them. The market sustained it and it's comparable to other CDN prices, I checked.
So then I went to check my server, which is a Knownhost VPS-4, and realized they give me 11 TB per month!
I was so busy worried about page speed that by the time bandwidth became the issue I didn't realize I was expected to pay absurd amounts for 1/11th the amount of bandwidth.
To double the pain in the ass, setting up an SSL certificate on a CDN is a pain. Let's Encrypt is rendered useless unless you want to intervene every 90 days to reupload your certificate to the CDN. And even then you still have to use their cruddy shared certificate for the CDN to be secured.
So it seems like the problem is solved. I can save up to $1000 a year, have about 10x the bandwidth for that much less, AND be able to Let's Encrypt with a cron job for renewal every 90 days or whatever. I may lose a 200ms of page speed around the US and more globally, but going HTTPS will likely make up for any long-tail loss.
That's my rant. Has anyone gone from using a CDN to not using one? Does anyone despise them? Does anyone pay the rates these days to keep using them? It seems like it only makes a lot of sense for magazine style sites. eCommerce and the rest still rely on the main server.
So by the time I pay for 25 TB of data on the CDN it's going to cost me something like $1200 a month, versus switching over to a dedicated server with SSD's and 26 TB for $350 or so... CDN's seem to be pricing themselves out of the market and will have to come back down to reality soon.
</rant>
