HN Explorer

Drop in Cloudflare Replacement

31 points by ivanstegic ↗ HN
Having trouble finding a drop-in replacement for Cloudflare. Any suggestions?

- CacheFly has no easy trial to sign up for - Fastly has no DNS - CDN77 has no DNS - Google, Amazon, Azure are stand alone CDN

There doesn't seem to be a good alternative? Or, am I missing something?

47 comments

[ 405 ms ] story [ 3505 ms ] thread
alberth
Which functionality from Cloudflare do you need? They have quite of few offerings.
latchkey
Or, what's wrong with CF?
MacsHeadroom
Centralization, censorship, not supporting competition, etc.
rsstack
- How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized?

- Your business, your values, you're of course free to ignore Cloudflare if you disagree with their policies.

- What kind of support are they supposed to give their competitors that they aren't?

Anunayj
I think your second point clearly explains OPs problems with CloudFlare, they're not asking you to move off Cloudflare, they themselves do not like it's core values, and would rather use some other CDN.
rsstack
Which OP?

OP who posted the original question? I don't see that they state why. I also don't see reasons in the comments. They could have other reasons. Which is fine, they asked a concrete question and they don't owe us reasons.

GP, who I'm replying to, stated some opinions on why one might wish to move off Cloudflare. I'm asking for clarifications on these vaguely stated opinions. If their only concern is the values, that's fine and it's why I didn't ask any clarifying question on that item. I asked questions about the two _other_ items.

I'll note that I am not a Cloudflare customer and haven't been since ~2019, just due to getting quoted lower rates by a competitor and our AE didn't want to or couldn't match. No one can ask me to move off Cloudflare at this point :)

yucky
>- How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized?

IPFS? Internet Computer?

I know HN hates crypto, but isn't this one of it's main use cases?

rsstack
Won't share my opinion on crypto, but concretely: I believe IPFS only serves static contents (which is what CDNs did a couple of decades ago) and doesn't serve web traffic directly due to latency and throughput limitations without a "centralized" CDN, such a Cloudflare https://developers.cloudflare.com/web3/ipfs-gateway/referenc....
MacsHeadroom
IPFS does serve traffic directly, and faster than through Cloudflare; if you run a local node. It accomplishes this by pre-caching content related to the content you access. So it is a bit network heavy. But I've been using it for about a year and the speed just can't be beat.

https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/

rsstack
Who needs to run the local node? The website owner or the website visitor?

(I never used IPFS.)

MacsHeadroom
Nobody needs to run a local node because there are proxies like Cloudflare. You've probably "used" IPFS without knowing it.

That said, visitors/people browsing the web can run a local node. A browser add-on overwrites proxy URLs to point at your local node.

Another way to think of it is that a local node is essentially your own personal CDN edge cache. Cloudflare's closest edge cache might be 20ms away. But if you run your own, it's just 0.2ms away!

The web browsing experience, while running a local node, is virtually unchanged. You may simply notice some speed ups loading content which makes heavy use of IPFS (which I regularly do, since most DApps use IPFS extensively).

hombre_fatal
Wouldn’t you have to put an http gateway in front of those things anyways for your users?
yucky
I'm not an expert, but I think as long as users use an advanced browser like Brave or Opera it will handle more protocols than just http (such as IPFS based websites) seamlessly. Not sure if Chrome has any support beyond extensions.
MacsHeadroom
> Your business, your values, you're of course free to ignore Cloudflare if you disagree with their policies

Yes, thank you for making my argument for me?

> How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized?

A CDN could not be centralized in the market by having meaningful competition. Cloudflare is in front of 80% of the Alexa top 1 million sites. That's a lot of eggs in one basket.

> What kind of support are they supposed to give their competitors that they aren't?

That's my bad. I meant that using Cloudflare is not supporting their competitors.

For what it's worth, I use Cloudflare for half a dozen sites. But I also run a local IPFS node (a decentralized CDN) because it fetches IPFS hosted content faster than the Cloudflare IPFS proxy does and because I don't like my own traffic being beholden to Cloudflare if I can help it.

rsstack
I'll just comment on this:

> Yes, thank you for making my argument for me?

Agreement isn't "making your argument for you". It is agreeing with your opinion. When discussing things with people, you often agree with things that they say - hopefully.

afiori
> How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized?

When people complain about centralization with CF the POV is not that CF is centralized in itself, but that much of the internet is centralized around CF.

ivanstegic
Honestly, it's the DNS and whole HTML/File assets caching and acceleration that it provides.
yamtaddle
If you're willing to have two logins rather than one, your options are practically limitless. Get DNS from one provider, CDN from another, problem solved. There's even a decent chance your registrar offers DNS, which means you're not adding an extra login (unless CloudFlare's also your registrar)

If you must have DNS bundled with the other stuff, your options are... way less limitless.

ivanstegic
I am OK with separating it out. It's much easier to manage for a larger number of clients though. That's why!
yamtaddle
Some providers of DNS and/or CDN have configuration Web APIs that can make managing multiple service providers less painful, especially if you're already scripting a lot of your other configuration (virtual machine deployments & config, or what have you)
ivanstegic
oh, also: separate accounts with domains per account so my clients can access their own set of domains. I need some sort of separation of permissions.
izzytcp
You won’t, unfortunately Cloudflare has no direct competitors.
rmdoss
A couple that I know:

Sucuri: DNS, WAF and CDN

NOC.org: DNS, WAF and CDN

ivanstegic
noc.org looked great to me, then I started clicking around and all I got what raw PHP files! for example, the homepage:

<?php

$content_canonical = "https://noc.org/"; $content_ogtype = "website";

include "includes/header.php"; ?> <!-- Mashead header--> <header class="masthead"> <div class="container px-5"> <div class="row gx-5 align-items-center"> <div class="col-lg-6"> <!-- Mashead text and app badges--> <div class="mb-5 mb-lg-0 text-center text-lg-start">

TheNewsIsHere
And unfortunately, Sucuri is a GoDaddy product now :(
mdasen
I think having separate DNS from your CDN isn't that big a deal, but bunny.net will combine both. Their DNS is currently in preview (open preview to anyone), but it looks like it'll be offering what you want.

Cloudflare has been taking a more expansive view of a CDN, but bunny.net seems to be going in that direction as well. They're offering CDN, DNS, storage, and video so far.

yamtaddle
> Cloudflare has been taking a more expansive view of a CDN, but bunny.net seems to be going in that direction as well. They're offering CDN, DNS, storage, and video so far.

I think most CDNs are at least trying to do this. I suspect the margins on nice-to-haves attached to CDN are way higher than heavily-commidified CDN on its own. Plus it gives you a deeper moat and much stronger lock-in.

freedom-fries
> Google, Amazon, Azure are stand alone CDN

Not really sure what exactly you are looking for and at what price point, but Google and AWS both have domain registration and WW highly available DNS services.

christophilus
It depends on why you use them. I use BunnyCDN which is fine for my usage. I use my own video transcoding servers (hosted on Netcup for suuuper cheap). I use Render for my applications. I use Cloudflare for a proxy, but could probably replace it in a week or so using Go + Caddy + a VPS of some kind and it would probably be fine for my use case.

It really depends on your use case and volume.

ivanstegic
I need something I can pay a fair amount for, that provides DNS service and HTML and file asset acceleration. I want to switch the proxy on, let it offload as much of the traffic from the original source server as possible, and forget about it. My clients should be able to control their DNS on their own, on let us do it for them. They should only have access to their own domains.
shyn3
Verizon has a good CDN but I don't know about managing multiple clients
Havoc
Bunny does now have DNS - though it is still in beta. Don't think they have support for sub-accounts/client access though
ivanstegic
bunny.net keeps coming up, that's great! any takes on CacheFly?
ofrzeta
We've been using KeyCDN for some applications. It's comparatively cheap and is based in Switzerland, if that matters.
jayFellows
There's https://fleek.co/.

It's not a drop-in replacement, but relevant to the conversation here.

Haven't used it yet but it's increasingly on my radar.

stevenicr
It's DDoS protection that cloudflare can handle, and provide subsidized, that makes it so valuable.

I too am interested in what competing services are available to protect dns / routing from DDoS..

Without cloudflare protecting the server ip / DNS, it only takes a few people using [script name] to essentially make a web site inaccessible (via Denial or Service attacks).

If many people want to brigade and create DDoS against a site it can be impossible for people to use it to communicate with it / through it.

Not sure there is a good / strong enough alternative, and not sure what the average / semi strong alternatives are at this time actually.

kmos17
Stackpath (previously maxcdn) has cdn/waf/dns with ddos. The service is actually really good and pricing very competitive. Support is knowledgeable and very helpful and the cdn has extensive customization options. Only downside I’ve seen is somewhat slower performance in Asia than comparable cdn’s. In terms of cost they blow cloudflare, fastly or aws out of the water once you start needing enterprise level features for small to medium size sites. I’m surprised they’re rarely mentioned on HN.
konha
> I’m surprised they’re rarely mentioned on HN.

I’m not surprised at all: No public information on pricing & “contact sales” buttons.

They don’t really seem to cater to small to medium sites.

kmos17
Not publicly disclosed pricing is very annoying I agree, not sure why stackpath doesn’t disclose them but the pricing we got with them was much lower than others. Also last time I was researching waf+cdn services it seemed to me all were doing the same thing, even if basic pricing was disclosed, real enterprise level features pricing were hidden behind contact us links, at least that was the case with fastly and cloudflare. With aws getting the ddos remediation team on a call required a $40k per year commit! Not in any way affiliated with them other than being a customer, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
ivanstegic
i was surprised to learn maxcdn was bought up when i remembered they existed. had a good experience with them previously, and they were fast. it's sad that there are still companies that don't have a way to try a service out WITHOUT having to call someone or email someone. just give me a way to login and poke around. how hard is that?
kmos17
Yes that seems to be a mistake. Not sure what their core market is today, maybe they rely more on an enterprise sales channel. I’d still recommend checking them out, I just hope they stay in business because I like the pricing, feature set and support! Last time I checked Cloudflare and fastly were very expensive once you need more advanced features.
leros
There is no 1:1 Cloudflare alternative.

You can replace lots of their functionality with a variety of competitors but they also have some truly unique features you can't find elsewhere.

nik_stackpath
@Ivan you can have all of the mentioned above within one login if you decide to check stackpath. I reached out to you on linkedin with no luck. Let me know if you want to connect and we talk more about your biz case.

Cheers!