CDN prices have skyrocketed since even 2 years ago it seems.

Ryuzaki

お前はもう死んでいる
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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>
 
DigitalOcean + Serverpilot + KeyCDN does all the SSL work automatically and KeyCDN is payment by credit which is preferable for me at this point.

I obviously don't use the same bandwidth, but for equal comparison, at about 1TB per month, it will work to about $40 monthly or $480 yearly. It feel as fast as MaxCDN, but I don't think the significance at that point is.... significant.

I was also able to cock bot block using CCarter's notes very easily, but that's via Serverpilot. Knownhost looks interesting. What would the differences be between an unmanaged VPS and something like Knownhost?
 
MaxCDN was bought out recently. I assume they're just going to passively force their existing clients to upgrade to the new company by not updating any MaxCDN features (like adding SSL), so I left. I had a $10/month CDNIFY account as my backup but I let the subscription lapse thinking I could jump back on when I really needed it. To your point, it's now like $200/month for their lowest plan.

And as mentioned by @doublethinker KeyCDN has LetsEncrypt integration where they autorenew the ssl cert for you every 90 days.

What would the differences be between an unmanaged VPS and something like Knownhost?

My understanding is that a managed VPS is almost always going to be Centos + cPanel (or a cheaper alternative), standardized that way so that it's relatively straightforward to provide you support. Whereas with unmanaged you're free to install any distro like Ubuntu and 'apt get install' whatever you want. I don't think managed hosting companies are willing to support their customers if they start mucking up the server using the command line.
 
My understanding is that a managed VPS is almost always going to be Centos + cPanel (or a cheaper alternative), standardized that way so that it's relatively straightforward to provide you support. Whereas with unmanaged you're free to install any distro like Ubuntu and 'apt get install' whatever you want. I don't think managed hosting companies are willing to support their customers if they start mucking up the server using the command line.

This is pretty correct. If you can do without a control panel obviously an unmanaged server is lot cheaper, but you has a higher barrier to entry because you need to know some linux stuff. I doubt most managed plans really provide you with much.
 
I stopped using a CDN about 18 months ago...

At the time I had no fucking business to be using one, but was still paying for it anyway.

Unless you're receiving a decent amount of traffic every day, week, month. Why use them? Yet I see so many people who are just getting started on a project using them from the off.

At this point, I'm still not using them because there are better ways to get more performance.

> Move off of WordPress
> Get better hosting

Ultimately a CDN is one of the last things I'll be looking at in terms of what's going on behind the content veil.
 
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