Bunny: A Cloudflare alternative?

The #MadeInEU movement has been pushed quite hard by the EU Commission and for a good reason too. EU has been long dependent on US tech and almost has no innovation in the tech industry. Large EU tech company that goes international that I know is probably only SAP. I too has been dependent on US tech company for my CDN, Cloudflare. So why not try out an EU alternative?

This website provides a list of EU alternatives for a lot of US tech. From that list, only Bunny CDN fits my budget (starts from $1 a month 😋). They also offers 14 days free trials with no string attached. Register with your email and you can try them out. So I did exactly that.

Bunny vs Cloudflare

Using Cloudflare's CDN requires you to also use their DNS service. Meanwhile, with Bunny CDN you don't have to. After you create their so called pull zone, you just need to make a CNAME for your domain to their CDN's URL. This waym visitors that visit www.febrian.de will get routed through their network. Certificate will be automatically provisioned with Let's Encrypt certificate.

That was easy, but... how about people that types the apex domain (febrian.de)? Apex domain cannot have CNAME, so this cannot be used for apex domain. Although some DNS provider offers the so called CNAME flattening, my provider, Hetzner, doesn't offer them. So for me, the simplest solution is to use their DNS service. Using their DNS service also enable domain-validation for the certificates, which enables wildcard.

Other features

Now let's explore other features they offer. One that caught my eyes is Perma-Cache. The premise is simple, they will hosts your files in different data centers around the world, not as a temporary cache, but permanently. They even offer FTP support for these storage. They also advertised the ease of use of this feature: One-Click Integration: Integrate Perma-Cache with the click of a button. Our system takes care of the rest..

HTTP 500. That's what I get after I enabled it 🥲, it just doesn't work in my setup. Did I made a mistake? Maybe, but where? It is really unclear for me why I got this errors. I tried turning off Smart Cache which only worsens the problem, since now everything is cached, including the HTML files, but every cached files return HTTP 500.

Well let's try other settings. They also advertise their optimizer with Perma-Cache: Connect Bunny Optimizer with Perma-Cache to keep your TTFB low and eliminate dynamic image transformation latency from slowing down your requests., so I enabled that feature. Then, it works..! Wow didn't expect that one 😂. After enabling the optimizer that costs $9.5 per month, I can see that the storage has a new folder called __bcdn_perma_cache__ and it's filled with caches.

Hmm let's try their CDN storage service. The storage service is used for Perma-Cache, but can also be used independently. So you can upload some files and then these files can be accessed over HTTP, just like S3. They even have S3 Compatibility mode. I tried uploading a static website and it works perfectly.

There are other features that I haven't got to test, such as their video streaming service, database, or edge scripting. Still, they cannot fully replace Cloudflare yet. For example, I use Cloudflare's Turnstile to secure the comment function of this blog, but Bunny currently doesn't have anything that can replace Turnstile.

Verdict

For now, I will keep using their CDN and DNS services for a few months. Their optimizer is a bit too expensive for me at $9.5 per month, that costs more than my VPS! . Their Perma-Cache concept seems cool, but doesn't work without the optimizer (at least for me). Their storage service and its S3 compatibility also sounds cool, but I have no use case for it now. Overall I think Bunny is worth using if you're only looking for a CDN.