Alternatives to using Fastly as a CDN

installation
1

I tried to use Fastly as a CDN for my private community and was surprised to see their free tier was not very useful. I am all for upgrading but I want to try the product before I buy.

These were my options -

  1. Paid account and HTTPS support ($50/ month) – the pricing is on the higher side for a starter.
  2. Fastly free tls with Fastly domain (I don’t want their domain as I already have one)
  3. nonssl.global.fastly.net IP set without HTTPS support (this was surprising)

Given this condition and the fact that Cloudflare does not work well with Discourse, which other CDN would people recommend to use?

Business specific details -

  1. We are based out of the Bay Area
  2. We are using a 2GB DO Droplet with base in SFO.
  3. Our two biggest markets are US and India, followed by Western Europe and Nigeria
  4. I am using WordPress as the core application with SSO and using Discourse shortcodes to show topics and few other things in WP
  5. I am running REST API to fetch some data from WP to Discourse.
  6. The speed is good in the US. My WP server is also in the US hosted on Siteground and I am using Cloudflare Pro for WP.
  7. The speed for Discourse is very slow outside the US. The community page takes 10-20 seconds to load in India! WP is slow too but not that much.
2

I have been using https://bunny.net/ and it has been really amazing. It might not be the biggest or fastest CDN but works really well with Discourse and the setup is minimal.

I pay less than $2/month as the pricing is a minimum of $1/month and based in traffic.

I use a cdn.<domain.com> URL and they manage the SSL via Let’s Encrypt once you prove you control the domain.

Referral link: bunny.net - The content delivery platform that truly hops

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3

We use cloudfront, $6pm for ~50gb of traffic, all of the edges

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