Amazon CloudFront

What hackers pick instead

• CloudflareRecommended for strong DDoS and bot protection and shielding origin servers, much of it free or cheap, though critics cite outages that take down huge parts of the web.744recommend
• Bunny.netA cheap, pay-as-you-go European CDN with edge scripting, popular as a Cloudflare alternative, though critics cite a data-loss bug downplayed for 15 months and a poorly handled security incident.121recommend
• Cloudflare CDNPeople recommend it for a free CDN tier with no bandwidth fees, speed and reliability; critics object to its centralizing power and its traffic inspection.12recommend
• Fastly CDNPeople recommend Fastly for performance, security and worldwide scale that holds up under heavy traffic. Critics point to egress costs and awkward configuration.10recommend
• Cloudflare Workers CacheLets Cloudflare Workers return cached responses without running the worker again, with cache tags for invalidation. Critics warn it may raise bills because of how requests are counted.10recommend

Every quote

The 36 most detailed of 36 comments. Each links to the original.

1. AWS just yesterday launched flat rate pricing for their CDN (including a flat rate allowance for bandwidth and S3 storage), including a guaranteed $0 tier.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “A $1k AWS mistake”

2. served millions of page views for next to nothing because most pages were already in the cache

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all”

3. we've had two recent issues -- both with cloudfront -- that were dealt with fairly promptly

   Mixed · May 2026 · in “Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out”

4. AWS CloudFront is free up to 1TB bandwidth and 10 million HTTP/HTTPS requests per month.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN”

5. So my website is on edge locations all over the world as part of their CDN for free

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Magit manuals are available online again”

6. CloudFront, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, and IPv6 support are all best-in-class.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue”

7. it looks compelling if your primary use case is serving data out of S3

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Ask HN: S3(AWS) vs R2(CF)–Which is better?”

8. exposing S3 data with CloudFront will decrease the transport cost

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Cloudflare K2: serverless event streams”

9. cloudfront scales to that level without work needed on my side

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “99% of My Website Traffic Is Bots”

10. It's fast and inexpensive, and so far perfectly solid.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to”

11. AWS Cloudfront + S3 is basically free for tiny sites.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “DeCloudflare”

12. or cloudfront for S3 in case you hit “scale”

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again”

13. including a guaranteed $0 tier

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “A $1k AWS mistake”

14. Extremely inexpensive also.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Ask HN: What static website generator should I use in 2026?”

15. Many CDNs do not support arbitrary Vary headers. Cloudfront, for example asks you to create a "Cache and Origin Request Policies"

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers”

16. It looks a lot like a CloudFront error we randomly saw today from one of our engineers in South America.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem”

17. all of my Cloudfront-hosted files were just unavailable on my business' site

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Sad Story of My Google Workspace Account Suspension”

18. 2-3 hours of config per project, every single time.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Show HN: Img-src – $5/month image CDN with on-the-fly transforms via URL params”

19. AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other CDNs, at least for sites that are not very high traffic.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Magit manuals are available online again”

20. It's all going behind CloudFront so there should be no need to pay for an IPv4 address for any internal machine.

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “IPv6 Traffic Crosses the 50% Mark for the First Time”

21. This + Function URL + Cloudfront, and you end up with an API entirely hosted in lambda.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

22. you can also put CloudFlare, CloudFront, or any other CDN in front of it instead

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Standalone webserver written in pure PHP. No more need for nginx, php-fpm, etc.”

23. Cloudfront's recent flat tier pricing would even probably do the trick.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “FileZilla Pro "Perpetual License" – A Warning to All Users”

24. I've used vary to quite a bit of success on CloudFront back in the day

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary”

25. match what Cloudflare/Cloudfront is doing from routing standpoint

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure”

26. Use a cdn like cloudflare or AWS CloudFront or depending on size

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions”

27. it would be a fraction of a fraction of that Vercel bill

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'”

28. behind CloudFront, of course

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot”

29. The SLA is only three 9s.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?”

30. CloudFront always felt a bit like AWS ticking a box ("we have a CDN") rather than being a good to use product.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “An Update on GitHub Availability”

31. The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep”

32. I am sad nobody has a LOIC powerful enough to disable CloudF{lare,ront}.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Nearly Half of LG Smart TV Apps Contain Residential Proxy SDKs”

33. Working to migrate from Cloudfront to Cloudflare at least

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Opus 4.6”

34. it would for example not connect to a v6 only origin

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Self-hosting a NAT Gateway”

35. it's not that simple yet. And it's more expensive

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Cloudflare was down”

36. I learned about that form the billing.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime”