In a time where more people usually beg for forgiveness instead of asking for permission, it already has
But that changes things
If they can't they probably should move to an international focused site.
Either way, we are on the internet. Pretty international stuff.
Not yet. Working on it, though.
An acronym as common as GDPR.
Or there is a loosely defined locally-run thing called 'Trading Standards' which is done at the council ("municipality") level.
and for the record I am just being difficult and everyone in tech/mildly well read knows what the (U.S.) FTC is. My point is more that one country's rules don't always matter for the operations of domestic commerce in another amongst their own citizens.
We famously mock our own jusrisprudence - "if Parliament passes a law that it is illegal to smoke on the streets of Paris, then it is illegal to smoke on the streets in Paris", so even when hard legislation exists (4chan/Ofcom shitshow?) it is meaningless.
The only power that matters long term in the universe is sheer force and hard power, and it has always been that way.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-...
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.
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.
ehhhh, really depends on which CDN features you're using, and at what volume. Using ESI? VCL? Signed URLs or auth? Any other custom functionality? Are you depending on your provider's bot management features which are "CONTACT FOR PRICE" with other providers? Does your CDN provider have a special egress deal with your cloud provider?
It's possible to picture this being easy in the same way that being multi-cloud or multi-region is easy.
I have no idea what two of those acronyms mean. None of this is part of what a CDN offers.
Yes if you use DDoS protection, or cloudfare’s ZeroTrust or embrace $X proprietary features then what I said no longer applies.
I strictly said DNS and CDN.
VCL = Varnish Configuration Language i.e. how you configure your Fastly services
If you're just using a CDN as a proxy then there's no lock in but plenty of sites are using CDNs for much more than that
1. For DNS we have standardized AXFR requests which the DNS provider needs to support as they are part of the DNS standard. There is not an option of not having that unless you have a really shitty provider that you should change anyway.
2. Same for Mass Import because again DNS already defines these things at the protocol level.
And resetting 2FA or whatever is just the cost of using any service
Personally I have used CF for ~10 years so I have saved $240 and I simultaneously use GitHub Pages and CF Pages for CDN because again I just need to give them a bunch of static files. Adding a third CDN provider would literally be a single command at the end of my build pipeline.
> Minimum Account Balance
> In order to keep your service online, you are required to keep a positive account credit balance. If your account balance drops low, our system will automatically send multiple warning emails. If despite that, you still fail to recharge your account, the system will automatically suspend your account and all your pull zones. Any data in your storage zones will also be deleted after a few days without a backup. Therefore, always make sure to keep your account in good standing.
You proactively replenish your balance, so in the worst case, you can just let the account go.
And how is that related to me? My comment said (and the parent I replied to) mentioned DNS and CDN.
Now we add compute services, data storage, whatever D1 is and the other comment mentioned auth/authz
Are people not aware what CDN and DNS are?
With free offerings, you’re always helping the supplier in some way. Then you become the product. Which makes it difficult to understand the value exchange; it’s much easier to do so when you’re just paying a fair sum of money.
Practically, any metered supplier can put you out of business. It usually doesn't happen because destruction is mutually assured.
+1 for using smaller, more independent companies in any case!
This logic doesn't hold much water, however. Abrupt changes in pricing or other conditions happen with paid tiers as well
But if a free offering suddenly says "We are getting rid of free, only starting $899 a month baseline, because we noticed our free users aren't converting and we only want to support enterprise from now on". Well, then I have to move everything.
Still a big price hike can come, but +20% monthly is easier to stomach than if I can't be sure what will happen to the free offering.
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.
Some of you may be skeptical about this but it allows for much easier management when working on multiple SaaS/hobby projects/personal tools.
That being said, I had enough issues with Bunny and CF debugging across regions that I made this free tool to do both remote HTTP and TCP traceroutes to keep my sanity: https://dnsisbeautiful.com/global-http-availability
That said, the edge-caching being how it is, it's possible to run into some race-conditions where the cache has been purged but not propagated to the edge network, and if visited too soon, the stale version might end up back into the cache.
[0]:
curl --fail --output "/dev/null" --silent --show-error -X POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/{our_zone_id}/purge_cache" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $CLOUDFLARE_CACHE_PURGE_API_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data '{"hosts": ["instorier.com", "www.instorier.com"]}'There’s a cost limit to how much high availability is worth on any project but vendors like CloudFlare don’t respect that.
A week ago I (a hobbyist running a small side project for a dollar or two a month in normal usage, so my account is marked as "individual") got hit with a ~$17,000 bill from Google cloud because some combination of key got leaked or my homelab got compromised, and the attacker consumed tens of thousands in gemini usage in only a few hours.
Google denied a rate adjustment, and haven't reached back out to me for a good few days now. My credit card denied the charge because it was over my credit limit by a good few thousand dollars and they suspected fraud, but now I am terrified of being taken to collections and ruining my prospects of renting an apartment due to my credit score/history being ruined, or them just taking me to court.
I am never going to use "use now pay later" services, especially with cloud portals where it's so hard to put in a actual cap, and the cloud provider not having any sane rate limits. I am fine paying if it was negligence or a mistake on my part as a very expensive lesson in security, but 17k is brutal.
The fact they don't have an easy way to hard cap usage (especially for an individual account) and have ineffective rate limits (how on earth is an account that pays a few dollars a month able to run up tens of thousands in just a few hours), makes me never want to use their (or any use now pay later with no easy caps or rate limits) service ever again. Or even a phone number to call.
Also before doing this save anything important that Google owns (gmail, youtube videos, anything in storage). The leaders at Google are vengeful enough to completely lock you out for challenging them.
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.
If i see something horrific like:
import * as BunnySDK from "@bunny.net/edgescript-sdk" BunnySDK.net.http.serve(async (request: Request) =>
Thats a proprietary lock-in worse than what it tries to replace!
> You provide handlers that fulfil requests from the system.
As I said previously, though I wish they were, such handlers are not part of WinterTC.
And then again, how those handlers are registered is also not part of WinterTC, which I also wish it were.
> APIs like that leak implementation details
How?
Almost all runtimes, like Bunny Edge Scripting, Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, etc. use the same basic signature for the handler:
(request: Request) => Promise<Response>
Only how you register said handler is, unfortunately, different for each runtime.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/handl...
But in practice, we almost never receive major contributions from outside the team. Which is fine. We're happy just to have our team working in the open.
The reasons we open sourced it are:
1. Support a realistic local dev environment (without binary blobs).
2. Provide an off-ramp for customers concerned about lock-in. Yes, really. We have big customers that demand this, and we have had big customers that actually did move off Cloudflare by switching to workerd on their own servers. It makes business sense for us to support this because otherwise we couldn't win those big customers in the first place.
The point of this discussion is that you can self-host, and you have a good chance of migrating the code away entirely. That's a big benefit that isn't "an attempt to get free labor". For that use, not only does it not matter if it's meaningfully open source, it doesn't matter if it's open source at all.
A few people here are complaining about the lack of a free tier, but Magic Containers can cover a lot of the same ground as Cloudflare's Durable Objects, which IIRC cost a minimum of $5/month.
But, a few things could be more straightforward. Cloudflare makes the whole static site and DNS zone piece feel far more seamless. With Bunny you will still need to stitch records between different parts of their dashboard.
Highly recommend their Edge Containers product, super simple and has nice primitives to deploy globally for a low latency workloads.
We connect all containers to one redis pubsub server to push important events like user billing overages, top-ups etc. Super simple, very fast, one config to manage all locations.
Bunny bills per resource utilization (not provisioned) and since we run backend on Go it consumes like 0.01 CPU and 15mb RAM per idle container and costs pennies.
I feel like you missed what the author meant with that phrase. The author wasn't talking about for their website, but the internet as a whole.
> I can’t help but feel that the idea of centralizing the internet into a single US corporation feels off.
The point of picking Bunny.net is that it's alternative to this single entity that's got so much of the internet running through it, and is less susceptible to the BS in the US.
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.
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.
In my case, and it was the 90s, I took the time to setup a way to pay by calling a premium (1-900) for $1.49 number so the barrier to entry even for kids was still reasonable.
Maybe in modern day the equivalent is adding Google pay and Apple pay then you cover some kids at least (gift cards and such).
Quite the hassle for the provider, and it will turn away any person who cares about privacy. There's no way to win anymore.
Good riddance to the "free" model. It's never actually free. You either pay with your data, or have to consume ads, or you're forcing other customers to pay for your free usage.
also I said this in a another thread, they charges 1$ even for single testing http request.
?
So 1 euro a month is too expensive for you? Wow.
Just pay the 1 Euro or go to GitHub where that is free but goes down almost every week.