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Show HN: I made a super-simple image CDN (magecdn.com)

48 points by shubhamjain ↗ HN
Hi HN,

MageCDN is a simple and affordable image hosting service I have been working on for the past few weeks. The idea came out of my own frustration with hosting and optimizing images for my blog.

While platforms like Imgur make it really simple to upload images, they don't allow you to embed them. Services like Cloudinary, Imagekit exist, but I found them too complex for my needs. Plus, they get really expensive past their free tier.

So, I started MageCDN with three simple goals:

- pricing should be affordable and scale linearly.

- basic image operations (resize, crop, optimize) should be doable within the app.

- uploading and getting a link you can use should be fast and hassle-free.

Would love to hear what you think!

40 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 97.7 ms ] thread
m-p-3
Hosting user-generated content makes it inevitable that someone will upload unsavory or even illegal content, are you using some kind image processing to identify that content proactively and flag it for review?

And best of luck in your endeavor!

adobrawy
No free trial, collecting credit cards highly reduces various abuses.
iamleppert
Have you ever done something like this before or your first time?
shubhamjain
This was one of the main reasons I didn't offer a free plan. Currently, there are no automated checks since there isn't a huge volume and it's pretty doable manually. But if the scope of abuse grows, I am willing to explore some options.

We do have it clarified what kind of content is prohibited under terms of use and how that can result in account being suspended.

ruckusing
Good on you to build a tool to scratch your itch!

As another poster highlighted, hosting other people's content is tricky. Its certainly not a business I would rather be in. I bet the management of this SaaS service is going to quickly take over your day job.

If you are just hosting your own content you can do it pretty cheaply using the AWS Serverless Image Handler stack:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/serverless-...

matrix2003
Oh, nice.

Mine isn’t image-based, but I rolled my own CDN using S3 as a backend, Lambda/DynamoDB for some metadata stuff, and Cloudfront as the CDN (so yeah, I didn’t roll my own CDN, I just implemented all the backend upload/admin stuff).

The great part is that it’s stupid cheap for a hobbyist, and Cloudfront has a generous free tier. I can also always swap that part out if it becomes too expensive.

janalsncm
The only thing that worries me about usage-based pricing is denial of wallet attacks. You mention there won’t be any surprise bills but if someone decides to hammer my image for 85 TB worth of traffic I don’t see any mechanism that would cap my spend in any way.
coolspot
They might be using a hosting that doesn’t charge insane prices for egress. Both Hetzner and DigitalOcean give first 20-23 TB of egress per month for free and then charge $10/TB overage.
tredre3
They use Bunny CDN who charge about $10/TB (it can be more or less depending on network choice and bulk).

If magecdn doesn't support setting a cap then their "no surprise charges" is misleading. But if they do support caps then it should be mentioned in the FAQ imho, it's a selling point.

mhuffman
From Hetzner's dedicated server pricing page:

>All root servers have a dedicated 1 GBit uplink by default and with it unlimited traffic. Inclusive monthly traffic for servers with 10G uplink is 20TB. There is no bandwidth limitation. We will charge € 1/TB for overusage

shubhamjain
BunnyCDN, the one I am using, does offer DDoS protection[1]. I would say that there's some inherent risk in that happening when you're using a CDN or hosting for that matter. None of the CDNs I know offer a spending limit. But as a small business, I am willing to understand the situation and waive off the charges on case-to-case basis.

On the other hand, if you incurred that kind of egress on Cloudfront, you'd have no option but to pay. The bigger platforms rarely budge in these kind of situations.

I would also add that large-scale DDoS attacks (something like 80+TB!!) are unusual, especially when the target is just a small website.

[1]: https://bunny.net/network/ddos-protection/

anonzzzies
We had instances in the past where an image (or other user generated content) suddenly got popular in china or japan and suddenly exhibited the same behaviour as a DDOS but it wasn't; just many people sending eachother the link to it. We got some lovely bills for that and had to build protections for it. This was a while ago, but it was a PITA considering this was a little fun free tool we built with no intentions of doing that much work on it.
yawnxyz
interesting, is this an interface on top of BunnyCDN? Would they be cheaper than Cloudflare image CDN?
emmanueloga_
I was wondering the same thing, why not using BunnyCDN directly? [1]

--

1: https://bunny.net/optimizer/transform-api/

ksec
Same question.

On another note bunny has really grown. From DNS to fonts

shubhamjain
1. It doesn't seem BunnyCDN offers format conversions. This can be pretty important if you have screenshots in PNG and you want to host them in a more optimized format.

2. It costs $9/mo/website, in addition to the bandwidth. We don't charge by websites at all.

3. It does solve the problem of optimization, and serving, but not really of storage. You'd still have to upload the files somewhere. BunnyCDN does have a storage option. But it isn't geared toward images (for eg, you can't paste screenshots).

More importantly, with BunnyCDN you'd have to configure pull zone, storage zone, enable optimizer before you can start serving images. MageCDN is plug-and-play!

emmanueloga_
These points make sense, if I where you I'd add a page explaining these in some detail. Heck, maybe A/B test conversion rate explaining and not, but I'm guessing a lot of people will ask themselves these questions.

Good luck with the business!

bentocorp
Would be good to have some rationale or understanding why someone would use this other than a broad based CDN such as CloudFlare or AWS?

Are image only CDN's a sustainable market? Maybe they are, and I'm just ignorant on why websites would choose such a thing over a general CDN.

Surely if someone has enough traffic or load to require a CDN then they would want it for their whole site and not just for image resources?

chillfox
I think this is for blogs/sales pages using shared hosting maybe also people who likes sharing images on forums. Uploading an image and then copy pasting the link looks a lot easier than navigating CloudFlare or AWS. Basically, if you feel comfortable with big cloud user interfaces then you are not the target.
curben
Image CDN primarily offers image resizing, especially useful for responsive images. It has a sizable market, both Cloudflare and AWS offer image processing service, see also major players like Cloudinary and Cloudimage.

Image and general CDNs are not exclusive: pictures resized on-the-fly and hosted on image CDN, while html/js/css hosted on general CDN.

youngtaff
Given Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly all offer image processing this isn’t a market I’d get into
matsur
Congrats on the launch. A small nit re: your pricing: you're charging for data transfer (bytes transferred over a long period of time), not bandwidth (bits transmitted at a point in time).
jdnbndhxb
Everyone does? If you sell bandwidth instead of data transfer, you have to either massively overcommit (and fear missuse by a couple of clients) or offer far so little bandwidth to be practical
strken
The problem here is not selling data transfer, it's that the pricing page says "15GB Bandwidth / mo" when it's selling data transfer.
Aeolun
$120/yearly, when the price is normally $10/month, is not 2 months free xD
chillfox
if you click the button for monthly billing the price is $12/month.
djbusby
And should be $100 annual; for the 2 months free to be true.
JasonSage
No, it’s $120 annual. It’s $144 when paying monthly, so the savings of $24 is the cost of two months.
ranger_danger
No DMCA report button... this is going to be interesting.
alberth
HN "Hug of Death" happening?
Havoc
There is no way in hell I’m ever using something internet facing that costs me 0.1 a gig. That’s just asking for a gigantic bill because some kid decided to mess with you or someone misconfigured something
kurisufag
the idea of a 14 year old skid with a grudge blasting reqs as fast as his python script can manage taking an appreciable amount of money from someone using

while True: requests.get("... .png")

is amusing.

hk1337
I hope it works out, it looks nice but we’re almost over saturated with image hosting options.

I feel like a better option would be creating an open source project of the application managing the images. With it doing something unique to its competitors and giving a way that someone could use it to manage their companies images.

kurisufag
>While platforms like Imgur make it really simple to upload images, they don't allow you to embed them.

...is this true? what's stopping you from getting the direct link and plugging it into your <img> tag or wherever your images from this would go?

djbusby
I've see imgur images embedded in pages just today!
shubhamjain
It might work depending on how Imgur chooses to police this, but it's explicitly prohibited [1].

> Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network

Imgur did shut down direct links to images being shared. Now they direct to the webpage:

http://i.imgur.com/FPyso27.png

So in the future, we might expect Imgur to only allow its own website as a valid referer.

[1]: https://imgur.com/tos

jdnbndhxb
Congratulations to your launch!

While I hope you all the best, I am wondering about the target audience?

If I have so many images, I want to use a CDN instead of the native storage solution offered by my blog/shop/forum, wouldn't I also want to use an API and have far more images than 10 GB?

mvuijlst
There's not a chance in hell I'm trusting image hosting to a company that could go under in a couple of weeks or months.
dougi3
Good luck, but no thanks