# Fastly CDN

10 Hacker News commenters recommended Fastly CDN and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend Fastly for performance, security and worldwide scale that holds up under heavy traffic. Critics point to egress costs and awkward configuration.

## Why people recommend it

- Handles heavy traffic without extra work (2 comments): "once allowed us to be featured in a very large newspaper without worries, extra expenses, or extra work" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45967649)) "If it has to be performant, secure, scaled worldwide, and always-on, it uses Fastly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49523835))
- Good CDN choice among alternatives (3 comments): "outsourcing that to Cloudflare or Fastly or Fly.io or whomever is a reasonable strategy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45902911)) "lambdas front ended by cloudflare or fastly are great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49191881)) "Fastly (US) and BunnyCDN (EU) are excellent options" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46170101))

## What people warn about

- Requires client fingerprinting (2 comments): "Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai refuse to talk to me before they can grab a unique fingerprint" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48232171)) "all the other cdn providers do this too, like akamai, fastly, cloudflare, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50096640))
- Connectivity and error-response failures (2 comments): "their fastly CDN not reply to us on IPv6 from the other side of the ocean for some weird reason" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48617857)) "did not notice it was only responding 502s until PyPI alerted them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622047))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Cloudflare](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare.md): 744 recommend
- [Bunny.net](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bunny-net.md): 121 recommend
- [Amazon CloudFront](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-cloudfront.md): 24 recommend
- [Cloudflare CDN](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-cdn.md): 12 recommend
- [Cloudflare Workers Cache](https://hackerapproved.com/p/workers-cache.md): 10 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://www.fastly.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Fastly CDN", https://hackerapproved.com/p/fastly/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).