Dropping Cloudflare for Bunny.net

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Motivations for Leaving Cloudflare / Trying Bunny.net

  • Desire to reduce internet centralization around a single US company and diversify infrastructure.
  • Preference for smaller, developer-focused providers with responsive support.
  • Interest in an EU-based CDN for GDPR alignment and non‑US jurisdiction, plus ability to get a DPA.

Bunny.net: Positives and Use Cases

  • Strong praise for: CDN, DNS, video streaming, image hosting, and “Magic/Edge Containers” for globally distributed APIs and backends.
  • Prepaid billing is seen as a major safety feature: no surprise six‑figure bills from attacks or misconfigurations; worst case is running out of credit.
  • Perceived as inexpensive for hobby sites; some report viral traffic costing only a few dollars.
  • Good support experiences contrasted against Cloudflare’s slow or non‑existent responses on lower tiers.
  • Useful for avoiding Cloudflare‑blocked IP ranges (e.g., Spanish ISPs blocking CF during football matches).

Bunny.net: Critiques and Issues

  • No free tier; even minimal usage requires ~1 EUR/month and a credit card. Seen as a barrier for hobbyists, teens, and education.
  • Reports of serious problems: users unable to reach assets, slow/poor support; cache issues; and a severe cache‑poisoning incident where porn frames appeared in educational videos.
  • Some confusion or criticism over incomplete IPv6 coverage across POPs.
  • Allegation that Bunny intentionally breaks Mastodon request signing, with support confirming but not fixing; motives unclear.
  • UX complaints: less integrated static-site + DNS flow than Cloudflare; cache purges sometimes flaky.

Cloudflare: Strengths and Concerns

  • Widely used for free, feature‑rich DNS, CDN, Workers, Pages, KV, R2, and tunnels. Excellent developer tooling (e.g., CLI) and “full stack” edge platform.
  • Free tier praised for enabling experimentation and low-cost startups, but criticized as a centralizing, subsidized “loss leader” that can create lock‑in.
  • Concerns about opaque pricing escalations (e.g., being forced to enterprise), vendor lock‑in (Workers, Durable Objects, etc.), and risk of arbitrary takedowns or compliance actions.

Broader Themes: Cost, Lock‑in, and Resilience

  • Debate over free vs low-paid tiers: free attracts abuse and is unstable; small paid tiers more predictable but exclude those without cards.
  • Some argue CDN/DNS portability is easy; others note real friction and platform‑specific features create de facto lock‑in.
  • Discussion of single‑provider fragility vs complexity and cost of multi‑CDN setups; no clear consensus.