Remember last year, one of my old customers have to build their own high-defense CDN, think you can save some money, the results did not last a month, was a wave of DDoS hit all over the place, the business stopped for two whole days, the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars. This buddy later found me crying, I just know, he thought to buy a few servers, pull a dedicated line can be fixed, the results of the reality of a hard draw him a mouth. Since then, I said to everyone: small and medium-sized enterprises do not blindly toss self-built CDN, unless you have a lot of money to burn panic, or the team hides a bunch of fairies.
High-defense CDN this thing, to put it bluntly, is to add a shield to the site, anti-DDoS attacks, accelerate content distribution. But self-built or purchase services, is not a technical problem, but the cost and survival issues. I found that the cost of self-built CDN is ridiculously high, the hardware and bandwidth alone can eat up most of your budget, not to mention maintenance. And what about buying services? Like CDN5, CDN07, pay a few hundred dollars a month to start, but also with 24-hour technical support. Don't believe those “self-built more free” nonsense, small and medium-sized enterprises have so many resources to spend on this head?
First of all, I would like to talk about the pit of self-built CDN. Costs, hardware servers, bandwidth, electricity, server room rental, add up to no two or three hundred thousand down. This is only the initial investment, the follow-up maintenance is more headache: you have to hire someone 7 × 24 hours to keep an eye on, in case of attack, they have to manually adjust the strategy, slow a second may crash. The technical threshold is also high, not to install a nginx, with a cache on the end of the matter.D protection rules, traffic cleaning, global node scheduling - these things without a few years of practical experience simply can not play. I've seen too many teams that thought they could handle it, only to be rubbed on the ground.
Plus purchasing the service. The advantages are too obvious: low cost, worry-free, flexible expansion. Like CDN5, I have recommended many customers, their cost-effective, basic package monthly payment of only 500 dollars, including 1T bandwidth and basic DDoS protection. For small and medium-sized websites, completely enough. CDN07 more fierce, the protection layer to do fine, can carry more than 500Gbps attacks, suitable for financial, game such high-risk industries. 08Host is winning in the stability of the nodes covering a wide range of low-latency, I have tested the Asian region, the average response time of 50ms or less. Purchase service is like renting a house, do not have to worry about decoration and maintenance, pay monthly on the line, the business is big at any time to upgrade.
In terms of technical details, a self-built CDN has to be built from scratch. For example, you'll have to configure cache rules and health checks, here's a sample nginx configuration:
But that's just the skinny. Real DDoS protection involves integrating hardware firewalls, setting up traffic thresholds, and deploying Anycast networks - it's just not possible without a team of professionals. But what about purchasing the service? One-click configuration, a few clicks in the background to take effect. For example, CDN07's console, comes with WAF and CC protection, the rule base is updated in real time, I have tested, can automatically block 99% common attacks.
The cost comparison is even more brutal. Self-built CDN: initial investment of at least 200,000 (servers, bandwidth prepaid), annual maintenance costs plus 100,000 (labor, electricity). Purchase of services: according to the package of CDN5, the annual payment is only 6,000 dollars, a difference of several orders of magnitude. SMBs are already cash flow constrained, so it's better to throw money at self-build than to invest in business growth. Don't forget, time is also a cost - self-build will take months to deploy, buy the service on the same day to go live.
There are also scalability issues. Self-built CDN nodes are limited and may not be able to hold up when sudden traffic comes. Purchase services like 08Host, hundreds of nodes around the world, elasticity and scalability, traffic doubling can also automatically expand capacity. These days, even the CDN have to “prevent teammates” - that is, you have to prevent the provider to fall off the chain, but the mainstream service providers have SLA guarantee, more reliable than self-built.
Of course, buying services is not without its drawbacks. Vendor lock-in can be a risk, such as high migration costs. But compared to the full set of risks of self-build, it's nothing at all. My experience is: when choosing a service provider, look at three things - protection ability, node quality, after-sales service. CDN5 does a good job in this regard, support for custom rules, customer service response is fast; CDN07 is good at playing hard to get, suitable for high-defense needs; 08Host is well-balanced, with a good balance of latency and stability.
To summarize, small and medium-sized enterprises really don't head iron to build their own CDN. unless you are the BAT kind of volume, or buy the service is definitely a more cost-effective choice. Save money and energy, enough for you to develop several new features. Remember, professional things to professional people - you focus on business, CDN to CDN5, CDN07 service providers, it is right.
