Comment by akdev1l
9 hours ago
>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.
> At least when it comes to CDN and DNS there’s literally no vendor lock-in.
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.
>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?
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.
ESI = Edge Side Includes think Server Side Includes on a CDN technology as supported by Akamai and used by sites like Ikea to deliver a fast maintainable experience
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
Can anyone say why this is being downvoted? Seems like it makes sense to me, but this isn't my area of expertise.
Predictability matters. The whole point of paying someone else to handle a problem for you is that you don't have to worry about it. If you go all in on a provider and then suddenly find out that you've been switched to a paid plan in the middle of your vacation, that's not a place anyone wants to be. Saying there's no lock-in is nice, but that overlooks the fact that there most definitely is friction. What if there's no mass export? No mass import? Or you need to reset 2FA? Or etc, there's a thousand things that can shoot you in the foot, especially if you have a lot of services you need to migrate.
It's impossible to generalize over free vs paid in regard to predictability. E.g. a provider I paid for simply disappeared once when I was quite busy while my old free gmail still works. Realistically CF's free tier is more predictable than many paid options on market.
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>What if there's no mass export? No mass import? Or you need to reset 2FA?
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.
Or your provider randomly decides you need to be on an enterprise plan: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
For personal projects, I'd rather just pay $2/month and not think about it than get hit with a random bill and scramble to migrate before the next month's bill. Bunny is perfect for this use case where you have a handful of projects that aren't all actively maintained. It just works without hand-holding, and since you're paying for the service, there's no rugpull looming.
Don't you still have to worry about big bills since bunny bills based on usage?
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I didn't downvote it, but I don't think migrating away from Cloudflare workers, R2, D1, etc., isn't going to be that easy. Basically, the build these things from the ground up to work optimally for their infra - even the mental model that you have to use is different. If you only narrowly use one part of it, maybe.
>Cloudflare workers, R2, D1, etc., isn't going to be that easy.
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?
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.
Yeah, good point. For a little hobbyist site of no importance, I'm not too worried about vendor lock-in, but that calculus changes as it gets more important.
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