The CDN landscape is a jungle! Need help finding one that gives you bang for your buck?
During my career, I’ve used several CDNs. Mostly ending up disappointed in terms of traffic impact or pricing.
Let me introduce you to Bunny.net. They’ve been around for a while now and have evolved into a platform that can compete with the big boys out there. I remember giving them a go years ago, but they didn’t impress me then.
What is a CDN?
For those of you who don’t know what a CDN does, it’s an acronym for Content Delivery Network, aimed at keeping assets (images, stylesheets, javascript, videos, etc.) at regional POPs (Point Of Presence) so those files can be served to your visitors with very low latency, speeding up your site.
The files are also cached there, so future visitors from the same region will be served the cached version, reducing the load of your origin server
Below are 11 reasons I would recommend bunny.net.
1 — Rates
The prices are very, very reasonable. Depending if you choose SSD or HDD storage, prices will vary.
2 — GEO redirection
If you didn’t know yet, nearly all CDN services would charge you a premium for traffic origination from low-bandwidth countries. The great thing about Bunny is that you can disable this traffic and redirect it to the nearest POP (in North America or the EU, with cheaper rates).
You can even choose to block entire countries completely.
For example, Russia. I believe in free speech and internet access, but when dealing with high-traffic site blocking, countries like Russia and China will see a large drop in bot, fake and security-related traffic.
Here’s my tweaked GEO setup:
3 — S3 Integration
You don’t need a web server as the origin server. Bunny offers perfect integration with any S3-compatible cloud storage, allowing you to store all your files and not need to bother with the costs and time of maintaining a fileserver.
4 — Security Features
They offer a simple yet fine-grained set of security features. Cloudflare, for example, has a complete WAF, which is overwhelming to set up for the first time and will no doubt lead to a loss of human visitors too.
Bunny.net does it differently:
Of course, they also offer free SSL certificates (unlimited, you can attach multiple hosts to a single pull zone)
You can also set custom error pages and publish a funky status widget on your site or intranet.
As the cherry on the cake, any URL served through the CDN can be signed, so the expiration is limited, and it can only be seen by the persons who need to see it (Hi Petalbot!)
5 — Optimizer
Cloudflare is the runner-up (and falling behind because of a clear focus, that’s a different story, though) since the JS/CSS optimizations they do usually will break your site.
Bunny set up a nice system which is a combination of common page speed improvement tactics combined with a genius image optimizer comparable to imagekit.io and the like.
The price? A flat fee of $9,95 per zone/mo.
The best part of the bunny.net image optimizer is the image transformation feature. You can change any aspect of the images on your site, ranging from brightness, hue, and contrast to tint, sepia, size, aspect ratio, flip, flop, and so forth.
Without having to pass all of these adjustments to a query string, you create a ‘collection’, that will do this for you. You can need to define the class in your image URL (mysite.com/images/image.jpg?class=myclass)
6 — Origin Shield
To protect the traffic to your origin, you can opt to spread requests over several of bunny.net’s pops, lowering the strain on your origin server (especially in the beginning or when adding lots of content all the time); this is a very good solution you should give a try!
7 — Edge Rules
Cloudflare names them page rules, but the concept is the same. On bunny.net’s edge nodes, you can set certain rules, change certain headers or perform other actions based on conditions you set.
9 — Video Hosting
This can be added to any site, either pull or push. Bunny will optimize your videos, host them and give full control of the player and other cool features. I haven’t used this one myself, so can show some screenshots.
10 — Perma Cache
This is a big saver and one of my favorites! Once retrieved from your origin, the files will be stored on bunny.net’s global network, with POPs in all major cities.
When a piece of content is requested for a second time, the POP only needs to ask its local storage if the file is there, saving a possibly expensive and long roundtrip from the POP to your origin. Haven’t seen this one anywhere before!
11 — Stats!
You might have already seen they keep access logs. You can store your logs on their platform, any Syslog or metrics server, or one of their Perma cache. Bunny.net also has a neat map of the world showing the usage per POP.
Stat-o-files, you’ll love this!
Conclusion
These are not even all the features they offer. Push zones, DNS hosting, great API. I still discover new things daily.
This, combined with the fine-grained control you have over all those features, makes my CDN of choice.
Why don’t you give them a try yourself? Try it risk-free for 14 days (you get plenty of traffic to do some proper testing)
#cdn #contentdelivery #loadbalancing #bunny.net
