Goodbye AWS - moving from Cloudfront to Bunny CDN

I have moved this blog’s CDN from AWS Cloudfront to Bunny CDN.

This is one more step in me moving away from US corporations to smaller European companies.

With everything that is happening in the world right now, I do not consider my data safe when stored on US soil, and I do not want to give my money to fuel companies and people who are, to put it bluntly, aggressive towards Europe, European Union and its values.

I don’t have any photos of bunnies so say hi to my cat instead.

I am around 90% done in moving away from Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and this change of CDN service is an important and overdue step in that transition. Now when you browse my blog, the images and video are being loaded from Bunny’s servers. I have already removed the last remaining files from AWS S3.

Why Bunny CDN?

Typical caveats apply, this is not a paid endorsement, Bunny has no idea who I am, and I am using it only because of the reasons provided below.

I found Bunny at the European Alternatives website which is an awesome place and you should definitely check it out. I also saw a few people recommending it in the Fediverse.

As I said in the beginning, I want move to smaller European companies so that both my data and my money stays in Europe. And Bunny is situated in Slovenia, a small eastern Europe country most known for its mammoth ski jump and being mistaken with Slovakia. And it has the tallest chimney in Europe.

First steps with Bunny

In comparison to AWS, Bunny is so beautifully simple (but I guess 99% of things are simple compared to AWS).

I created an account, set up 2FA and started to look around. I want to use Bunny as a typical CDN, storing my assets and serving them from several location around the world. So first I created a Storage Zone to which I uploaded all of the images and videos present on this blog. For that I used the ancient technology of FTP, as it was the simplest to just upload a few hundred files, but there are also other means available.

With that done, I set up a Pull Zone and connected it to the Storage. With that, every file become available under the url of that Pull Zone. And le voila bueno, the only thing left was to do a global search and replace of all my blog posts, to well, you know, replace Cloudfront’s URL with the one from Bunny.

And one great thing coming from Bunny’s simplicity and them focusing only on few services, is that right away on the main page I get stats telling me my current usage and cost. And speaking of that.

Pricing and comparing to AWS

Here is Bunny’s pricing: (link).

Before I left AWS Cloudfront, I checked my monthly transfers (even that was not that easy with AWS) and they were in the range of few GB per month. Which means that in my case, I will pay next to nothing, maybe a few cents per month for hosting my multimedia, just as with Cloudfront.

Lol, after I published this post I received feedback that this is not the case, and that on the exact Pricing page I linked above there is, in large, clear font, written “$1 monthly minimum.”

And with Bunny it’s easy to setup transfer limits in case an AI crawler visits my blog and decides to download every image a million times, because this is what AI does. And I see that they have some sort of DDOS protection which I haven’t read into yet.

What I don’t like

I’ve been only exploring Bunny for a few days, and for now I haven’t found anything I disliked. The only thing I miss would be support for Prometheus or any other way to pull the stats into Grafana, but that would be just a nice to have gimmick, not something important.

If anything else comes up, I’ll do a followup blog post.

Bottom Line

I know that my few cents/grosze a month will not make any Excel sheet turn from green to red for AWS or the other way round for Bunny.

But this migration is something important for me, and I feel that I am going in the right direction, and I encourage everyone to do the same.

With that done, this blog is hosted on a German VPS, the code is hosted on Codeberg and Forgejo which are also German, the CDN is Slovenian, and the domain company is Polish. I feel like listening to the Ode to Joy now.

Thanks for reading!