In the interests of transparent disclosure on such a positive blog post, It might be worth calling out that all the links on the page are all linked to the Bunny Affiliate Program. [1]
I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".
I'd rather have a low fee now, a change from $2 to $3 is more likely and that's fine for me. But from free to not free is risky for me.
I also like smaller, independent-ish ompanies that actually care about developers. That's why I use bunny.net, transistor.fm, Plausible Analytics.
I'm currently running a SaaS on Cloudflare Workers + Pages. The developer experience is genuinely good, deploying serverless functions and static sites from the same repo has been seamless.
But I hit a real issue recently: CDN edge caching served stale HTML after a deploy, and the service worker cached the bad response. Took a CDN purge from the dashboard to fix. The debugging experience when things go wrong at the edge is painful, you're always guessing which cache layer is the problem.
That being said, the free tier is hard to beat for getting started. Workers, Pages, KV, R2 — you can run a full production app at near-zero cost until you hit scale. Not sure if Bunny offers that.
Cloudflare is not a CDN anymore but the workers edge platform, if you can move to bunny.net, you were not really using cloudflare. I don't understand how none of the alternatives really embrace WinterTC
If i see something horrific like:
import * as BunnySDK from "@bunny.net/edgescript-sdk"
BunnySDK.net.http.serve(async (request: Request) =>
Thats a proprietary lock-in worse than what it tries to replace!
We use them for a couple of things - very happy. I think probably the best reason (other than service robustness): support. CloudFlare is great until it's not, and you aren't paying $$$ for enterprise support. This is probably one of the most underrated reasons to switch to any lesser known (but still rock solid) infra services. UpCloud too - great support!
> It’s a single point of failure for the internet. Every Cloudflare outage ends up in the news.
I hear this argument all the time, but I think it's more complicated.
Firstly, if people used more diverse / smaller services the distribution of outages would change.
While there will likely to be more frequent "smaller" asynchronous outages, many platforms can still break even when only one of their dependencies break. So, you might likely to face even more frequent outages, although not synchronous.
Secondly, we are not sure if these smaller services are on par with the reliability of Cloudflare and other big players.
Thirdly, not all Cloudflare infrastructure is fully centralized. There is definitely some degree of distribution and independence in/between different Cloudflare services. Some Cloudflare outages can still be non global (limited by region or customers that use certain feature set, etc).
I switched a year ago and have been absolutely loving them. Not just because we can support a EU based CDN, but their Magic Containers are amazing. I can have global instantly scalable API's that cost me barely $1 a month until used.
This has to be an ad right? Affiliate link in the blog, non sensical reasoning for switching (single point of failure to... another single point of failure) etc
Unfortunately it doesn't offer free hosting for hobbyists. Even for superficial traffic you'll have pay 1 euro a month (plus VAT).
Not many DNS management providers (that I'm aware of, please correct me) support CNAME flattening. That is having your A record point to a CNAME.
Every time I purge the pull zone cache, I do it twice, cause once from my CI isn't enough. My CI does individual page cache invalidation during deployment, but there needs to be some kind of delay (with no feedback) when assets are distributed across.
We at ottex.ai use bunny.net to deploy globally an openrouter like speach-to-text API (5 continents, 26 locations, idle cost 3$).
Highly recommend their Edge Containers product, super simple and has nice primitives to deploy globally for a low latency workloads.
We connect all containers to one redis pubsub server to push important events like user billing overages, top-ups etc. Super simple, very fast, one config to manage all locations.
I've been on Bunny for a while now, personally. It's pretty good, and I managed to dodge the last major Cloudflare outage which was nice.
But, a few things could be more straightforward. Cloudflare makes the whole static site and DNS zone piece feel far more seamless. With Bunny you will still need to stitch records between different parts of their dashboard.
But 1TB of bandwidth with Bunny costs $10 while you can do tens maybe even hundreds of them for free on Cloudflare. EU,Privacy etc. to side, nothing can beat Cloudflare when it comes performance/features vs. price
I do have a question, is it even possible to have a CDN set up where they don't MITM and strip your TLS and re-encrypt or are we just picking which jurisdiction gets to inspect your traffic?
edit: I'm thinking of the use case where the CDN as a proxy for APIs and uncachable content as well, where it used as a reverse proxy for transit/ddos protection.
R2 is pretty darn hard to beat. No egress, and only like $.57 per million read operations. If you're running a video streaming use case (and not using terabytes and caching or abusing your bandwidth) I found no one else compares.
Does anyone have thoughts or disagree on this in terms of pricing and cost effectiveness?
I had to move to Bunny.net after Cloudflare disabled my homepage following a malicious report, despite me being a paying customer for several years. I also never received a response to my appeal.
I’ve now been with Bunny.net for over a year and have been very happy with the service.
your enthusiasm for the service might be justified but having every mention of its name be a hyperlink with referral code feels offputting like i'm about to enter a multi-level marketing scheme
I’ve mainly been using cloudflare for the very excellent (and free) premium DNS offering.
Easy upload of bind test files
Flattened CNAME to support naked domains
Robust free role based permissions to add other ppl
Anyone have suggestions for moving a stack of domains, many being little community and hobby projects away from cloudflare for a small overall price. Agency pricing like migadu offers for email on custom domains is what I have in mind.
We had severe issues with Bunny and recently migrated off it.
Some of our users were unable to reach our CDN altogether. They couldn't load any assets at all. Bunny's customer service was far too slow to respond and mostly gave unhelpful answers. They couldn't even identify the issue.
In less than 45 minutes, I moved our CDN entirely from Bunny to Cloudflare Workers. Now our CDN just actually works, I don't have to debug our CDN for the Bunny customer service team.
We switched from Wistia to their video streaming offer and literally decimated our video hosting costs. Exactly what we needed with none of the upselling B.S.
Seemingly lacks IPv6 though? Cloudflare requires you to pay them and make an explicit effort to disable IPv6. Sad to see it not enabled by default on Bunny.
This isn't an either/or, you can use features from both and you have to compare carefully. I used to do a lot of image manipulation and had pluggable implementations for imgix, cloudflare images, and bunny. Bunny is by far the cheapest and that ended up being the mature solution (plus some custom processing). But for other caching, R2, workers, etc CF is great.
I use bunny as an image serving and video streaming across multiple projects and it is excellent, never had an issue with it.
They recently upgraded the player for streaming media, we use in one instance for tutorial videos, that apparently adds some missing accessibility features. All we needed to do was adjust the embed URL structure we were using and all set.
Their web site left me with a bad taste. I want to like them but… No front page pricing. Popups obscuring screen, with no options I agree with. Standard safari shows blank page for products. Cute images that overwhelm content. How many sign up for free prompts are enough?
I would probably switch off Cloudflare if I didn't also make use of their Cloudflare Tunnels service for sharing some stuff in a way that doesn't require me to punch a hole in my home network. I realize Pangolin and such also exist, but it's nice to get it for free
I tried to move my sites to Bunny Edge Scripting and found the experience mostly poor, unfortunately. A lot of failures without error logs, and purging the pull zone cache only seemed to work sometimes. A shame because I like their offering otherwise.
I understand desire to get off US infra. But Bunny.net is Slovenian, and Slovenia borders Hungary, a de facto Russian vassal state. Other nations would be safer. If you want to de-risk you should really de-risk.
211 comments
[1] https://bunny.net/affiliate/
I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".
I'd rather have a low fee now, a change from $2 to $3 is more likely and that's fine for me. But from free to not free is risky for me.
I also like smaller, independent-ish ompanies that actually care about developers. That's why I use bunny.net, transistor.fm, Plausible Analytics.
But I hit a real issue recently: CDN edge caching served stale HTML after a deploy, and the service worker cached the bad response. Took a CDN purge from the dashboard to fix. The debugging experience when things go wrong at the edge is painful, you're always guessing which cache layer is the problem.
That being said, the free tier is hard to beat for getting started. Workers, Pages, KV, R2 — you can run a full production app at near-zero cost until you hit scale. Not sure if Bunny offers that.
If i see something horrific like:
import * as BunnySDK from "@bunny.net/edgescript-sdk" BunnySDK.net.http.serve(async (request: Request) =>
Thats a proprietary lock-in worse than what it tries to replace!
> It’s a single point of failure for the internet. Every Cloudflare outage ends up in the news.
I hear this argument all the time, but I think it's more complicated.
Firstly, if people used more diverse / smaller services the distribution of outages would change. While there will likely to be more frequent "smaller" asynchronous outages, many platforms can still break even when only one of their dependencies break. So, you might likely to face even more frequent outages, although not synchronous.
Secondly, we are not sure if these smaller services are on par with the reliability of Cloudflare and other big players.
Thirdly, not all Cloudflare infrastructure is fully centralized. There is definitely some degree of distribution and independence in/between different Cloudflare services. Some Cloudflare outages can still be non global (limited by region or customers that use certain feature set, etc).
Not many DNS management providers (that I'm aware of, please correct me) support CNAME flattening. That is having your A record point to a CNAME.
Every time I purge the pull zone cache, I do it twice, cause once from my CI isn't enough. My CI does individual page cache invalidation during deployment, but there needs to be some kind of delay (with no feedback) when assets are distributed across.
Highly recommend their Edge Containers product, super simple and has nice primitives to deploy globally for a low latency workloads.
We connect all containers to one redis pubsub server to push important events like user billing overages, top-ups etc. Super simple, very fast, one config to manage all locations.
But, a few things could be more straightforward. Cloudflare makes the whole static site and DNS zone piece feel far more seamless. With Bunny you will still need to stitch records between different parts of their dashboard.
edit: I'm thinking of the use case where the CDN as a proxy for APIs and uncachable content as well, where it used as a reverse proxy for transit/ddos protection.
https://social.mikutter.hachune.net/@mok/116208294430782702
BunnyCDN intentionally mis-writes any Mastodon request signing, as to make it incompatible with Mastodon.
And, they confirmed it's intentional.
Does anyone have thoughts or disagree on this in terms of pricing and cost effectiveness?
I’ve now been with Bunny.net for over a year and have been very happy with the service.
https://www.goodboydigital.com/pixijs/bunnymark/
I'd assume most bots don't have a GPU attached :)
Easy upload of bind test files Flattened CNAME to support naked domains Robust free role based permissions to add other ppl
Anyone have suggestions for moving a stack of domains, many being little community and hobby projects away from cloudflare for a small overall price. Agency pricing like migadu offers for email on custom domains is what I have in mind.
https://www.migadu.com/pricing/
Some of our users were unable to reach our CDN altogether. They couldn't load any assets at all. Bunny's customer service was far too slow to respond and mostly gave unhelpful answers. They couldn't even identify the issue.
In less than 45 minutes, I moved our CDN entirely from Bunny to Cloudflare Workers. Now our CDN just actually works, I don't have to debug our CDN for the Bunny customer service team.
Also, this is obviously a marketing post.
For DNS, it's cool because you can have it return scripted results which makes dns-based load balancing a bit "better".
https://docs.bunny.net/dns/scriptable/introduction
Only using edge storage, DNS, and CDN so far but very happy with Bunny.
They recently upgraded the player for streaming media, we use in one instance for tutorial videos, that apparently adds some missing accessibility features. All we needed to do was adjust the embed URL structure we were using and all set.