Free or cheap website CDN / cache / facade cloud thingy
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I have a personal website, hosted on my home server, using my home cable connection with static IP.
As you might imagine, while this was good enough for my personal git server and media storage stuff, I want something more reliable for the website.
For now, I have subscribed to the Cloudflare free plan. On top of reducing my bandwidth overhead, they also have this nifty thing:
This is exactly what I need. Keep the freedom of having my own dedicated server (on the cheap), but also have a reliable "facade" in front of it, to cover my screwups, restarts, outages and all the other crap that a real hosting provider would take care for me.
Unfortunately, cloudflare people are aware a bunch of rando cheapskates would use their service like this, so they considerably gimped this feature: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/202238800-Why-is-Always-Online-not-working-
... We crawl Free customers once every 7 days ...
CloudFlare doesn't cache every page on your site. A limited cache of your site will be displayed, generally 1-3 pages, which means that only some pages on your site will be viewable when your origin server goes down.They also display a godawful ugly error frame around the site when it's offline. So while this is better than nothing, it's less than ideal.
The ideal here would be:
- Cache ALL static content (basically anything you can GET)
- Don't display any error overlay
- Update every day or so
- Free, or up to a few bucks / month
So, does anyone have any better alternative?
One thought I had was to build my own front layer on the cheapest VPS I could find (like DigitalOcean) and put THAT behind cloudflare (for bandwidth protection). But we are really getting into a rube-goldberg situation here, so I'd much rather prefer some cloud based (and cheap/FREE) solution.
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@cartman82 said in Free or cheap website CDN / cache / facade cloud thingy:
One thought I had was to build my own front layer on the cheapest VPS I could find (like DigitalOcean) and put THAT behind cloudflare (for bandwidth protection)
Sounds like what I would have done.
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Unless it's mega high traffic i'd just stick it on EC2 or Digital Ocean or similar and not bother with Cloudflare.
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@loopback0 This. None of my sites have ever needed a CDN.
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@Yamikuronue
Obviously, you didn't implement sufficiently Web 2.0 avatars.
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The y CDN services from , or seem pretty dang cheap, but sadly I don't think they're designed to stay online when your server goes down.
Still, they're a good approximation to a solution, so I guess it depends on what your specific situation is .
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@anonymous234 said in Free or cheap website CDN / cache / facade cloud thingy:
Still, they're a good approximation to a solution
Just how willing are you to take downtime? Put a cash value on it. $10/month? $100? Until you're realistic about it, you'll have no way to evaluate the value to you of the various commercial offerings. For a number of sites I've run in the past, the value of keeping things resilient was next to $0/month, so I didn't bother. But pretending that you don't think about things like that just hurts you, since resilience isn't something that happens magically for nothing; it's a service and so must be paid for somewhere (even if sometimes in kind rather than money).
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@anonymous234 Hmm, cloudfront is a paid solution. I hate it that all prices on AWS are fluid and based on usage. That puts all the risk on me. A strong DDOS attack could screw me up.
If I went with a paid solution, I think I'd rather get a $5 VPS and host my shit there. I'm not really after a strong CDN at all, just improved reliability.
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@cartman82 said in Free or cheap website CDN / cache / facade cloud thingy:
I hate it that all prices on AWS are fluid and based on usage. That puts all the risk on me. A strong DDOS attack could screw me up.
Nearlyfreespeech.net does usage-based charges as well, but they're (a) prepaid, so they'll disable your site if your balance is exhausted rather than continue to serve data until you're seriously in the red and (b) dirt cheap.
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@flabdablet they are managed hosting, unfortunately. No way I'm trying to deploy my overenginered pos thing without an ssh + git.
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stephen@kitchen:~$ ssh ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net [flabdablet /home/public]$ git --version git version 2.9.0 [flabdablet /home/public]$
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@flabdablet Hmmm, interesting.
Presuming the minimum 1GB / month bandwidth, here's their estimation for my setup (python + tornado, no database):
$3 is better than the VPS minimum of $5, so this is a real choice if I only need a single site (which I do, for now).
I think I'll wait a few months with the current setup and see how much bandwidth I'll actually use and how much downtime I'll actually have. If the current setup proves as unreliable as I fear, I might go with these guys.
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@cartman82 said in Free or cheap website CDN / cache / facade cloud thingy:
I hate it that all prices on AWS are fluid and based on usage. That puts all the risk on me. A strong DDOS attack could screw me up.
You can set a billing limit on those services, or at least on Azure.
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@cartman82 said in Free or cheap website CDN / cache / facade cloud thingy:
I think I'll wait a few months with the current setup and see how much bandwidth I'll actually use and how much downtime I'll actually have. If the current setup proves as unreliable as I fear, I might go with these guys.
NO NO! YOU MUST OPTIMIZE NOW!