I've always looked for a EU based alternative to Cloudflare; not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company, but pushing for and testing EU services is important particularly in the light of recent developments in EU-US geopolitics.
The problem is that many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart. Consider Hetzner as an example: how can you imagine being competitive with US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) by raising the prices so much, in such a short time, with so little previous communication to your customers?
BunnyNet on the other hand is being competitive and this move is in the right direction. Of course their free tier is not comparable to Cloudflare (they are two different companies, with different profiles in terms of debt, cash in hand and so on), but it doesn't need to be for small projects.
I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
Well that's a strange way of expressing competitiveness when Hetzner is still vastly cheaper than those 3 cloud providers, despite those cost increases.
I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.
There is also large premium for hosting in Ashburn compared to Europe for the CPX line, which are the shared/subscribed tier. The SKUs are different so its not directly comparable but for example CPX32 (4vCPU/8GB) is 35.49 EUR in Falkenstein but a CPX31 (4vCPU/8GB) is 62.49 EUR in Ashburn and has far less bandwidth.
Not sure. They were cheaper than DigitalOcean, to the point where 1 DO instance cost would give you 3 on Hetzner, but now they're at parity, and DO seems to have a better product.
The vps performance is not comparable to a dedicated server. Same cpu’s still means twice as slow. Also hetzner alllows for much larger servers in terms of memory at still a fraction of do pricing
The reason I use a VPS is to not use hosted anything, personally. So I guess whether that makes it a better product or not is highly personal.
Speaking for myself, I used $5 DO droplets for quite a while when learning but as soon as I switched to real projects and realized how quickly the price ramped up, I moved to Hetzner and the simplicity of their interface was a breath of fresh air. I saved a ton of time after switching. So to me, Hetzner has the superior product.
For the most part I agree but poor performance on network block storage is very limiting. Also there is no object store service available in Ashburn, its only in EU. My point is more that DO has a complete modern cloud platform, and Hetzner doesn't quite.
Yes Hetzner is still vastly cheaper option but there are better options now compared to hetzner and the issue is the way that they handled the pricing.
Its just simply unsustainable and burns a lot of trust/good will if you increase your prices 3x in such a short period of time
Trust me when I say this but Hetzner really belonged in its category previously. I had scoured almost everything and nothing could provide the scale at price Hetzner did back then but now I would say that its simply not true anymore and that there might be better options out there for what its worth.
I am really sad for Hetzner as I really enjoyed them and always wanted to build on top of them but looks like all good things come to an end :-(
Are you a Hetzner customer? I'm a Hetzner customer, and my prices did not increase by 3x (it was more like 1.25x) and the price increase was communicated months in advance and several times. I am running stuff on their older infra, so maybe they handled it differently? When hardwares price go up at least 4x for storage and ram, I don't see how you can avoid price increases and they are still one of the cheaper/cheapest options for what I need.
I am a Hetzner customer. I was in the middle of migrating infrastructure from DigitalOcean to Hetzner, most of all because DO's i/o on their droplets has been abysmal for a long time now.
Hetzner's latest price increase doubled-to-tripled the costs of any new resources I would deploy there. I've now halted the migration and I am seriously considering going all the way back to colo.
This most recent price increase was not communicated months in advance. I'm kind of wondering if you're thinking of the other price increase that happened this year, and not the most recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540844
Certain things went up more severely than others. CPX VMs went up by close to 3x, for example, whereas CX VMs didn't. Which is strange, because the justification they gave was about RAM/Disk prices, not CPU.
I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.
My frugality had made me found cheaper options than Hetzner (at the cost of my sanity /jk)
But, hetzner was a really solid deal especially for larger specs, literally nothing could compete with it as I used to make literal lists of providers in my head that can compete against Hetzner/ovhcloud and there were none. They were so good, too good in fact and I had actually felt like they were so giant that they would be able to survive the ramflation and it would be the small shops who would be hurt the most but turns out that although yes small shops are hurt, even the largest of giants like Hetzner couldn't resist the Ramflation and were (forced?) for price increase whereas incredibly I have found small shops to still somehow be more resistant/competitive than the larger beasts.
Pardon me if I am wrong, which I usually am, but aren't there price differences between pre-existing customers and new customers as well, atleast if I am remembering it correctly.
@AussieWog93's comments also make sense in terms of somethings going up by 3x. There seems to be a general consensus online from my limited understanding that some if not many products have increased their prices quite substantially.
Contabo does have some steal factor involved, unfortunately and their support times aren't great though many people have quite differing and polarizing experience about them or so I have heard as I haven't really tried them personally.
But its good that contabo is able to be working for ya, They are quite price competitive and the issue with them as said prior really isn't their price so much as though all the other things.
So I am happy for you that it works out for you in the end! :-D
>When hardwares price go up at least 4x for storage and ram, I don't see how you can avoid price increases
You said you are on older infra? So why did they increase your costs 1.25x?
That old hardware has long depreciated and paid itself back many times over and you run a higher risk of an outage due to components wearing out over time.
I suspect that the pressure on this old infra had increased (because the customers started moving onto it); from the market POV it makes sense to put a bit more pressure on the customer tbh.
The problem is that the company is burning existing customers - for whom the hardware has already been long purchased - to subsidize new customers coming in during this time of higher hardware costs.
And burning existing customers costs a lot more than soaking new customers. Churn always costs far more in lost revenue than a slowdown in new customers. Plus, it impacts market image in a deeply negative way.
I understand that and I am not denying that but it would be now unfair to say that Hetzner belongs in its own category as there are now other alternatives who do compete with Hetzner in its pricing, who also I suppose weren't able to magically buy cheap hardware but I suppose some of them might've lucked out with good deals beforehand and spare-capacity.
Overall I am unsure of how much of the thing was under Hetzner's control itself or not in terms of raising the prices given Ramflation but in deep part I am saddened by it rather than angry on the state of how the whole situation turned out to be, and I wish nothing but good for hetzner as they move past this ramflation and hopefully people are able to give a look at some smaller shops as well which are made of mostly lovely people as well.
I hope that more people look at smaller hosting providers in general who were previously unable to compete at the level of hetzner but now are actually able to do so. I recommend trying them out and talking with them and using it for atleast hobby projects and hopefully even serious projects as I know some hosting providers smaller in scale than Hetzner but are something on which I might feel as comfortable as Hetzner on deploying, if not a bit more because sadly for better or for worse Hetzner is quite strict in some aspects.
some already have spare capacity, others have better contracts with their vendors and some can provide DDR3 and specialize in that type of ram and some providers are willing to eat the costs to be better competitive and that the future would be better, some are doing things for ideological reasons as they themselves don't wish to raise prices because they want to provide better for the customers (strange I know but I know of one provider who has said that)
Not everything is good though and some providers are in fact dead-pooling as well and shutting down or raising prices but not to the degree of 3 times. They don't have the leverage that Hetzner does and people would simply migrate but both Buyvm and netcup are notable examples of price increase at the levels of 18-20% for most usecases which was still comparatively high back when they were done but understandable because of ram crisis, which is why my understanding of hetzner's price increase stops being a little understandable.
Ram prices are already declining from its peak and its around 2028 when its mentioned to have a glut. So as easy as it is for me to say but the crisis is comparatively short and there have been other costs involved for hosting providers which is declining (cost of IPv4 is declining as AWS,Google and other giants have stopped hoarding/buying even more IPv4)
It's a tough space for hosting provider but I hope I have shown the how part of how they manage it, its not as easy as it was during the 2020's but it is managable with some smart price increases and other mechanisms or so I have heard. I have just recently bought a few 7$/yr vps's from such shared providers. They don't earn too much from the 7$/yr vps's as much as they earn from the word of mouth (TNAHosting ftw) and thinking of it as (amortizing?) advertisement costs.
Which is why considering all of this and the fact that I was a very massive Hetzner fan back in the day pre price increase, I have felt like the way Hetzner has done things just doesn't feel very Hetzner-y and that there were better ways to manage it and even if not, then there are better shops out there welcoming you, waiting for you to give them a shot as well. I have written another comment detailing some other MASSIVE list of providers as well if this interests ya.
Many smaller providers have reasonable price/features but you need to dig in a comparison site or just generally to find them I guess. Like e.g serversearcher.com serverhunter etc
If you want very small servers: either get a 7$/yr vps or (upcloud if all you want is 1gb ram/1core esq server for very lightweight purposes)
The thing after Hetzner's price increase is that there isn't one size fits all anymore and I guess it might not impact people like me who knows in my opinion, many providers but in this situation its a net loss for many who might be paying higher prices. So here is my small list:
if you want vps that are behind nat: @backtogeek at (tierhive.net) is your guy. He's on hackernews as well.
If you want a very small vps with high egress: Upcloud is an interesting option as they provide 33TB (100mbps) even on their smallest machines. Ionos is a good option as well.
Dedirock/host-c are good for storage backup. Don't rely on their reliability or bandwidth but rely on having multiple deplyoments on different such servers for good backups.
Main: OVHCloud/Greencloud/onidel/buyvm and to a lesser degree Netcup as well are some good verdicts. I like layer7 and servarica as well and I have personally talked in direct messages to the person behind loclix.io
I personally use TNAHosting/Avahosting 7$/11$ yr servers respectively as I am idling them. You might be amazed by what 7$ servers can achieve as I usually code in golang/rust which work extremely good, I also host my own mail server on Tnahosting as it has port 25 enabled (though I do this just for fun) and in my lifetime, I also had a Netcup vps for 10$ for 3 months which had 8gb ram and 4 cores and 500 gb HDD.
I use cloudflare tunnels in front of my vps to prevent DDOS, not that my website has a lot of traffic anyway and have previously made custom scripts to manage it easier and I sometimes use zed and zed's remote server to connect to my server especially when I was on my netcup server and I also use micro-editor quite frequently on my vps's.
Oh can't forget xhosts.uk if you want UK vps's. I really feel like they are a good host and I have said their story on HN earlier as well but they sadly had some disabilities but instead of taking the disability check, they wanted to earn and make their own way and so have operated a vps servers because they like doing this. I really have a lot of respect for them.
"instead of taking the easy option and claim all kinds of money from the government for my disabilities I work as much as I can and hope I strike it lucky with the right customers one day."
This is a comment that they had written with me in personal discussions.
Ethernet servers is a good provider if you want port 25 access/mail access from what I've heard about them as they don't usually allow it. Skrime.eu can fit in some of my criterias as well. H4F.net(Riyad) is a respected provider as well.
Advinserver is good as well as they provide the stats of all servers so you can find the amount of steal and other factors and I have heard some people say some good things about them.
Hosting is one of the few businesses which is cooperative and competitive between many of these players and especially on the lower side of things run much on goodwill. There are always some cases of complaints but its a comfy space. You can almost find a specific host which can be best for your use case and it can be worth finding them out. I have tried to give the limited knowledge that I have.
but lets face it, what i have written is probably a brain fart and Its mostly information overload and I dont expect people to change their providers with this but my point is to be more aware about the provider space in general and to find the best provider for your own specific use case.
Feel free to e-mail me (mail in profile) if you have any specific use case and if I could help optimize the bill or give a more specific list of providers who can help in your use case. Price itself isn't the only factor as there are of reputation, steal factor, long term sustainability and many others.
I have spent too much time on such forums (to even a detrimental cost indeed) and I just like sharing the few things that I know. Perhaps I can get someone to save some money as some of these providers have affiliate programs and I can then spend that money to buy more french fries :-D
Have a nice day and take care. Domains are much more simplified though than servers and I recommend people to look at https://tld-list.com if they want to find out about domains.
I also recommend looking at serververify which is a website created by the creator of colocrossing iirc: https://serververify.com
I have personally used serverdeals.cc and vpspricetracker.com in the past and they are some good resources BUT most of what I have snatched are within flash-sales of various kinds, whether just for as providers running it for an advertisement way or when I was using a netcup instance on their christmas/Advent calendar deals.
are there US based providers i.e data centers in the US you recommend for cheap VPS like the one the $7/11 year VPS options you mention since most of those are European based ?
I'm a Hetzner customer and this year's price rises have been well communicated.
Everyone's prices have gone up and i checked if i could go elsewhere and they are still cheaper for their quality level. Deffo beat Digital Ocean and cloud overlords like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc for my needs.
I am particularly pleased they locked in my old hosting plan prices after the recent increase. Seems fair. New hardware has skyrocketed in cost so I don't see how you can avoid price increases.
They are competitive price wise, but less competent human wise.
Their lack of user care shows when you start talking to support. I've never had this experience with an US company (except the US giants) where support basically gives me an "it is what it is".
The most recent that really put the cherry on top.
I was planning on dropping them when running out of prepaid credits.
ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.
What is a point of a credit bar (progress bar) of you can go into negative? I went into negative.
There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Which should remain as credits in your account for future use.
But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
Support: paraphrasing "that sounds right". And I could be quoting them with this for almost all 3 times I've interacted with them.
Yes, I am very much unpleased on customer support experience. But they are not unique and a symptom of multiple EU providers I've switched to in the last 3 years.
Not saying there are companies going above and beyond for customer service but getting a human answer at all when spending single-digit euros a month seems impressive enough; then again I am european so certainly biased :)
What would an american provider have done? Changed their pricing model for you?
It is common for support to closely work with product and be able to respond with product roadmap and feature guidance.
At least they can say "we sympathize but it's not a priority" or "it's a medium priority but we don't have a concrete timeline" or at least recommend best practices/workarounds
My website traffic was a couple megabytes per month. I paid them for about 3 years for neglegible usage. Should I have zero expectation for paying because its cheap?
You can be metered or fixed price. Mixing the two in the most inuintive way possible is a true innovation. /s
Other cloud based provider have the option to pay for your usage to the cent. I guess that innovation didn't reach the EU. /s
Assuming they've hosted you for 3 full years, I wouldn't mind the 10 euros. Even small sites need all infra to work. The fact that your site is small only means it costs less in transfer.
My experience with all EU providers so far is yes, you do have to prepay, I think Hetzner for exemple was 20 euros when I signed up years ago?
Most likely they are unwilling to let customers pay later without any guarantee that they're good faith and solvent. Maybe it is a cultural thing? It's only my personal opinion but it never struck me as unreasonable.
Something similar happened to me with twilio - years ago I had a number 'parked' with them, my card expired, they never notified me, account went into arrears, and they cancelled my number. I was quite a special number, a UK '0200' number they'd released somehow, which shouldn't have been released. When they then acquired sendgrid, to add insult to injury I eventually found out that I was blacklisted and had to go through various validation procedures in order to do business with them, which I declined to do.
How much do you pay per month? Never expect a real human tech expert if you only pay 10$/month for something. A human talking to you for 15minutes destroys their entire profit margin on your payments for years. Unless you hit a bug or something in their system, support is expensive.
> ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.
"Our system will automatically send multiple warning emails if your account balance drops beyond a certain point" from https://bunny.net/faq
I don't know what that "certain point" is, though.
> There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Yeah, annoying but also understandable because of payment processing fees.
> But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
That's incorrect, if you have zones, then you get billed €1/mo, if you don't have anything, then you aren't billed anything... this is my billing history:
First one didn't happen, so I don't know what the threshold is. But don't sell me a credit based system if it can go in the negative. Again for a progress bar that doesn't represent negatives.
You are correct on the billing front. I checked the dashboard and I misremembered the day I switched off my resources. June was a slow moving month and I though it happened last month!
I'll retract my claim in the previous comment if I still can edit.
Maybe an acknowledgement that is a limitation that they understand and it would be something they could change in the future. Maybe showing understanding that it is surprising that a credit based system goes into negative.
I don't know, this was not the first time I got surprised by their system.
Before that I preloaded my account for a couple of credits (+vat). Then they switched to monthly invoicing (+vat for my existing credit). Basically I got double VATed (?) for the single initial payment. Paid for 12 months upfront only to have to recharge more quickly. Why should it be my problem that they have problems understanding billing and building billing systems?
In the past when I signed up it was advertised as usage based billing with the fixed monthly fee somewhere in the fine print? But there is also some usage minimum because at some point I started getting credits used. But not in the first few months where my traffic was under some threshold.
It doesn't help that they constantly move things around in their website with no clear thought. Like how I was corrected in another comment thread with information that isn't on the expected pages like pricing or terms of service.
Maybe they just lack understanding of user experience. Or I'm just a dumb user. I accept either theory.
edit: honestly I don't know if I was double VAT situation or just became a non VAT except company, and ain't gonna dig that up, but if it's the later they should have swallowed the cost for existing credit because changing expected outcomes mid way is no bueno.
(Before Linode was acquired) I called in and quickly got on the phone with a live human who was very familiar with the product and helpful, and sounded (accent) like US-based support.
> I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
That sounds like a GPT trope, and seems a slightly weird thing to say: the only reason I thought you might be choosing it because it was European was because your entire comment talked about how you were looking for EU alternatives, and how Bunny is better than other European alternatives.
Come to think about it, this is exactly the sort of output I would expect if a sales person at Bunny had asked GPT to generate a response to sound authentic whilst pointing out out that Bunny is European and better than Hetzner.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're using AI, because I trust you're a legitimate user, and it's also the sort of thing a legitimate user would say, but the style and tone of your comment feels a bit... uncanny. Sorry!
I think you're confusing this with the more classic "it's not X, but Y" trope. That sentence is a comma splice that I'd expect LLMs to avoid by default.
I agree! It might even be an issue on my side, where I'm exposed to AI generated stuff that often that everything starts looking like a trope when it's not.
Either way, I've seen more than enough in this comment section to make me want to avoid bunny for now anyway.
Interesting side thought, dunno if it would give any real indication, but I assume the difference between pasting a bunch of text vs typing each character would seem like a potential indicator (for now) whether someone might have used AI to respond.
If my comment is more than a few sentences, I’ll often type it up in my Notes app and paste it in. It means I don’t lose it if there’s some kind of technical issue, and I don’t run the risk of accidentally fat-fingering the Submit or Reload buttons. I do it with text messages too.
As a general observation, because I can't vouch for who used AI or not, claiming LLM is also a quick way to dismiss things. LLMs learned from human output so it should be obvious to anyone that enough humans write or express ideas in that style that it became the default for LLMs. Ideas were rarely judged on their merit on the internet even before LLMs, this AI age just gave those looking for a shallow dismissal more options.
I'm really sorry if it sounded like a GPT trope, but that came 100% from me.
Not that this is a guarantee of quality (actually it's not), but certainly
authenticity. Probably I'm using so many agents lately that I'm starting
speaking like them lol
If you want I can make it sound more natural, just let me know and I'll change it!
This is how the bourgeoisie win. By getting the intellectuals to fight amongst themselves, not about the ideas in the text that might threaten them, but by an offkilter assessment of the idea's provenance. Come on. Maybe We could argue about immigrants instead?
As someone who recently switched from Rackspace to Hetzner for my dedicated VPS (albeit before the recent price jump), I am still quite happy with my decision. Apparently they are not raising their prices for existing customers, but even so, their prices are consistent and very clearly laid out, they don't change month-to-month, and their website is incredibly easy to use (both when choosing options, and when doing server management), which is more than I can say for Rackspace lol (or Linode now that they're owned by Akamai)
To be fair, a large fraction of Hetzner's costs will be RAM/SSD prices (since that is what they are selling), and they're in a competitive market, and known to have competitive pricing.
Bunny CDN of course runs on RAM/SSD but their costs are also developing and operating services on top. Their costs are comparatively less impacted by the RAM/SSD issue.
Hetzner might not have raised prices so suddenly if they had similar services.
Indeed, Hetzner DNS has been free for a long time.
The Hetzner price increase was brutal, but the reality is: Hetzner VPS prices are still a fraction of comparable AWS EC2 instances.
>many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart.
I don't think any serious Enterprise account would go with Hetzner today, the service range and depth is simply not comparable to the 3 big clouds. Saving $20 on a VPS is not going to be a deciding factor for Enterprise accounts, they want mature, manage services.
> not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company,
Great for what? Centralizing the internet? making it impossible to exercise your rights to delete your account? Not making alternative plans when one line of change breaks many services?
Just looked at their website, they don't do many loss leaders as others, for example others offer free static site hosting.
But they are a private company with only one small $6m funding round back in 2022, so I think they are more focused on building organically and not chasing investor funded growth.
It sounds like they made it free for customers for up to 500 domains. It also sounds like they were charging for DNS resolution before? Or is it DNS hosting?
>So, we’ve eliminated DNS query fees entirely.
> Bunny DNS no longer charges for DNS queries and includes free DNS hosting for up to 500 domains per account. There are no query limits, no per-request billing, and no critical features hidden behind enterprise plans. (Yes, that includes smart records and health monitoring too.)
>As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.
> It also sounds like they were charging for DNS resolution before? Or is it DNS hosting?
High end DNS hosting is often billed around the number of queries, number of zones, and number of records, number of special names with fancy features, etc. If you're switching from other DNS hosting, you might not even know what the query volume is, so that's kind of exciting when you need to make a switch.
If you were paying per query and the cost was too high, raising TTLs and consolidating services onto fewer hostnames are pretty achievable ways to reduce the query volume, so it is something you have some control over.
The one dollar thing isn’t as bad in practice as it sounds since it covers everything. Basically invoice minimum across everything so if you’re using the platform in any meaningful way it’s a non issue
It is bad, because I don't use Bunny for anything else and so this made it paid DNS for me, so when I was migrating DNS a few months ago it made me rule them out.
KYC is a thing in Europe. Internet infrastructure businesses won't do business anonymously as they'd be held liable for anything their anonymous customer did.
Most European hosting providers don't KYC. Infrastructure providers are rarely held liable for customer actions in Europe. Most enforcement around this sort of thing is around sanctions violations (Stark Industries).
You don't need a credit card on file, you can prepay and use that balance instead.
I'll also say that I've used around 140 gigs of bandwidth the last two months and my costs has only been <$2. Worth it to me, and doubly worth it to avoid the tyranny of big tech (which includes cloudflare).
AWS can make data export free, and no-one's going to shout at them that it's not free because it cost money to store the data there in the first place.
Bunny offers a number of services to paying customers. One of the services, that would previously have incurred a cost, now does not. It is free.
> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.
Sure seems like you’re trying very hard to find a problem here.
If you’re not down with their prepaid/$1 model there is always CF.
I'm glad to hear the queries are free now! I somehow managed to blow through the free quota, not by like a crazy amount but enough that I started thinking in most circumstances why pay extra for basic dns when registrar's is free? Even barely used domains were getting tons of queries. And I only need the fancy failover feature on a couple domains, though it is nice for those for sure. Anyway with this I don't have to worry about it anymore, so thanks Bunny!
You only have to have them be your domain's name servers. Domains can stay at another registrar. This is pretty risk-free. They didn't even used to be a registrar until recently and they don't support registering all tlds so this always worked.
Cloudflare's business model appears to be wait till someone is generating lots of bandwidth and then give them 30 days to move up a tier or be closed down.
I've read reports of companies on the business plan being strong armed into signing Enterprise plans with 1 year upfront.
It's a listed company with revenue expectations, and VERY good at marketing itself, but it's free tier of CDN/DDOS to start off with is a good deal.
Cloudflare's business model was to protect DDoS "providers"/booters for free, so DDoS became something everyone had to worry about (before cloudflare they tended to DDoS eachother), and then sell the cure.
Krebs wrote some rather scathing posts about them when they were starting up.
I want to love Bunny. But I am terrified about being suddenly charged thousands of euros if some unexpected traffic from LLM/crawler activity happens.
As far as I know, Bunny products are their own business units with their own goals and feature requests (Bunny Stream, in particular, lacks a lot of features) and the “block all requests after the bill becomes 50 EUR” ONLY exists for Bunny CDN, not for their other products.
The day Bunny starts treating all their products evenly (and listen to requests asking to implement basic features) will be the day I will switch all my nonprofit communities to their services.
You wouldn’t be charged thousands because the service is pre-paid. Your websites will be suspended once the balance runs out, but you can re-establish them once you add more balance.
AFAIK is the only provider in which you can have functional billing limits and not just alerts that still depend on you reacting on them in time.
It’s not like they’re going to put a debt collector after the $0.73 that you’d owe, so I’m not sure what was your point. If you want the services to continue you gotta have some balance. If they allow your account to run below balance I’d say that’s on them.
It's not an accurate correction. It's prepaid with an ability to incur a small amount of negative balance, partly for protection against downtime or data loss and partly so the systems can have some time to shut off (it would be hard to suspend service immediately across all services). However it is purely prepaid in that they don't provide a postpaid option.
That's a very uncharitable way of dismissing my claim that the parent claim of the service stopping automatically when you go over your credits is not true.
That's one thing. The second thing, I'm happy for you that you have more information about their pricing system than their pricing page and terms of service page state.
It's inaccurate to say that it isn't purely prepaid, because that could be taken to mean that some services are available to be postpaid, with a due date. Here you can see that a negative balance isn't the same sort of thing as having a postpaid bill due: https://support.bunny.net/hc/en-us/articles/8726637076124-My...
It's not not purely prepaid. It is purely prepaid through I might favor another way of saying it that specifically says that they don't offer any services on a postpaid basis. But even if you define purely prepaid differently from me, it doesn't work so well as a correction because the comment being replied to didn't use the term "purely prepaid" or something highly similar.
Where in the terms of service or in the admin UI do you see this information? You can pre-pay, yes, and the CDN service (and ONLY the CDN service) has a setting to stop the billing. But the other services do not seem to have a limit on how much you can get billed.
But yes, other services will run until your account is dry, then it gets suspended. You can't set a spend limit on your scripts without it taking down the whole account. You can't do cost optimization, but at least you are protected from going bankrupt.
> I want to love Bunny. But I am terrified about being suddenly charged thousands of euros if some unexpected traffic from LLM/crawler activity happens.
If it's just some simple website, then LLM/crawlers probably won't get you anywhere near thousands of euros. The CDN costs $0.01 - $0.06 per GB
...
You can limit some of their services, like the CDN (which is the most important one in my opinion):
- Download speed limit
- Requests per IP
- Data transfer per IP
- Max connections per IP
And monthly bandwidth limit, which disables the zone if you reach x GB.
I'm really waiting for a streamlined static website hosting experience to move everything to Bunny. At the moment, Cloudflare Pages is still much more straightforward with one CLI command to deploy a website.
Also, we are using Bunny containers with our global API gateway with 16 worldwide locations and it is really crazy - the cost is $3.60/mo (Go backend + Bunny billing based on resource utilization, not provisioning). With a relatively small usage of 20k API requests/mo, it's still stupidly cheap.
I hope this might be of use to you, it's exactly that, one-command deployments. :) It's still early, but I'm using it across my deployments and it works pretty flawlessly.
For the people asking what kind of DNS service this is, content or proxy: You have to look 'Bunny DNS' up in the products menu and from there follow the hyperlink to the doco.
So it's content DNS service; with server-side resource record shuffling; and with JavaScript, and badly written examples that don't check the question type, just to make it weird.
I am seeing way to many "Performing security verification
This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot." from Cloudfare these days. It strikes me that, if it has verified my client once, it should hold off at least for a day or so before putting me through that hoop again. How does Bunny DNS deal with bot protection?
Wasn't Privacy Pass supposed to fix this? Let the browser generate and store some PoW or something that it hands off to the site, so each site doesn't have to do the same thing.
I have the same experience, and I ended up removing Cloudflare from the websites I manage since there were too many complaints from users with shared connections or exotic browsers.
Not sure if you're talking about different sites or same one. If different sites, it doesn't make much sense to add that feature because site owners would rarely (if ever) want it. If same site, blame again the site owner who has the ability to configure challenge cookie expiry.
Damn!! I just tried a few links from navbar... all loaded in an instant like they have already been cached, even though they were not (since I use firefox in full private mode, and haven't visited their site in like months before today).
Very nice and a great service. I wish there API Keys were scoped however so setting up continuous deployments doesn't risk your, say, MX records getting changed if the key is leaked. And it would be very awesome if they would support IPv6-only origins for the CDN.
We're doing discovery on API key scopes at the moment, we don't yet have a public ETA for this but rest assured it's being worked on!
Regarding IPv6-only origin support, We brought this in just last week! We now support IPv6-only addresses direct as an origin, as a hostname, as well as dual stack hostname resolution.
If you had have supported API key scoping then I'd have a ton of businesses/startups running on you. As it stands currently it's difficult for me to recommend you to orgs that are scaling up. Compliance in particular was the biggest issue. For one-man shops it's a no-brainer.
In your defense, Cloudflare has historically also sucked in this area.
It would be awesome if the API would get more robust and documented in general -- right now it seems some params seem to not really work (ex storage zone search), and other endpoints take so many without much clarity over what will be set as the default and what's required. I found that for most calls I needed to check the network requests from the dashboard to see how to use them, would be awesome to have more documentation and examples here showing common flows.
When the comparison is literally every other cloud provider who all charge by usage only, then anything more than $0.00 is in my opinion too much to ask for.
I’ve been using cloud services in one way or another from different providers (including EU based like Hetzner) and never seen this before. It’s always been pay for what you use and nothing more, which is kind of the whole pitch of cloud services.
It's nothing new to make a DNS service free, but still kudos to Bunny. I moved to Bunny CDN couple of months ago from CF and it's been great so far. They don't have all that fancy things that CF has, but I guess it's also not their target. It's a great and extremely fast CDN that makes it easy to host many kind of websites. They also have things like Edge Rules, WAF, Cache Control etc.
I deploy my website using their API. So on every push, GitHub Actions builds it and copies the dist/ to Bunny and purges the cache afterwards. Everything has been working perfectly. I can only recommend. It's also quite easy if you don't know about the modern way of doing things and just want to use an FTP to put your website online. Especially attractive for IndieWeb folks.
I'm using Bunny DNS and it's been mostly unremarkable (which is a very good thing for a DNS provider)!
The only annoyance is that their domain import auto-detects existing records, but it seems to miss a lot of them so you end up manually copying a lot of things over anyway.
Almost no mainstream existing provider you’re migrating from would support AXFR from Bunny’s servers. But yes, AXFR would be the ideal solution in a perfect world.
iirc at least some providers let you whitelist AXFR for migrating away from them, but seems like it is usually only if you pay enough (i. e. restricted to enterprise plans).
Since it's much rarer than I thought, I guess it makes sense bunny haven't implemented support for ingesting with AXFR.
I'm a BunnyDNS user and wanted to share a warning - the import from a zone file can drop records silently, and the export will fail to export some of your records. I reported bugs some months ago, they replied they've fixed some but it's still a problem.
Spirit: ensure you keep a good copy of your zone files (bind format), their import / export has issues (it also doesn't include SOA or NS records). I spent time (before the recent fixes) manually validating records.
I've owned domains for ~20 years... I'm okay for paying for the domain, I'm okay with some of that money being used to maintain the DNS servers... I've never had a company charge for queries. Why would they do that?
Wait, someone paid them for DNS before? It was many FREE DNS services since early 00's, I even will not say nothing about the domain names registrants who almost always (with literally few exceptions) provides free DNS.
Uh, paying for DNS isn't uncommon? Examples off the top of my head:
- Akamai DNS
- AWS Route 53
- Azure DNS
- Cloudflare (excluding personal/hobbyist plan)
- Google Cloud DNS
And many, many others. And I note the site you posted this comment on is using Route 53, so probably paid as I doubt their query volume would be in the free tier.
Paying for DNS for personal/hobby stuff is probably pretty uncommon, because like you say, most domain registrars will offer it for free. But commercial websites often will, particularly larger ones with serious traffic.
I believe they're referring to the DNS servers. The closer they are to the user, the faster a DNS resolution happens.
A good provider will have different locations across the world, and users connect to the nearest datacentre. The free DNS some domain registrars offer is, sometimes, hosted at one single location. If the server is in the US and the user is in Europe, you're adding 80-150ms to requests. If they use "anycast" servers, the user could connect to a server 1-20ms away.
Amazon Route 53 is $0.40 per million DNS queries - which would terrify me if I used it, considering a typical 10Gbit server connection hosted at a unscrupulous ASN with no egress IP filtering is capable of sending a million DNS requests per second from random spoofed IP addresses.
I just signed up.
The website (despite saying it's free here) has numerous banners of trials and free credits. Not quite what I was expecting from 'free'
Have you managed to turn everything off? I had been playing with magic containers, turned everything off and then discovered every month I was charged 1usd + vat for nothing. A bit annoying.
The one thing I wish they’d support is multiple zones and an RBAC system to grant certain users access to specific zones. If they’d offer that they’d be a serious contender to replace Cloudflare and AWS/GCP DNS
Their claim is that they are European, but I see a US support hotline in the footer and all prices are in Dollar. Seems to be targeting the US market (which is smart), but I don't know whether the European angle wins there.
Free secondary or are people supposed to make them primary and manage their DNS through Bunny? If primary that is the same sales technique Cloudflare used. It works, once one's DNS is managed there enabling CDN features is just clicking buttons.
This is nice, I have some nameservers pointing to Hetzner so I can use Caddy to do domain validation via API and get https (with dedicated domains) on private LANs. But the Hetzner API keys are horribly, uncomfortably over-scoped and I haven't found a way to reduce that.
At least when I do DNS at bunny, a leaked key can't rent VMs on my CC. And I prefer EU infra (cloudflare works great though for this usecase). Who knows that my bunny account can grow into ;)
I just discovered bunny.net thanks to this post. I'd be happy to move my static websites on bunny.net, but is it possible (like on cloudflare) to map requests to /foo to the foo.html file ? According to what I read on the documentation it is not a edge rule.
Faster name resolution is chasing a local maximum. The better path to improving the internet is to rely on DNS less and content addressing more, that way content stays accessible as long as somebody on your part of the network has it.
Sure but it's a different game if instead of finding the machine that has the data, it can find any machine that has the data. That machine might be elsewhere on your lan or elsewhere in your city.
But that's not how DNS works. It does not find /the/ node that matches the host element of the resource. It finds a list of nodes (often a subset of eligible nodes).
I think it is a step in the right direction for bunny to be a competitive for the people on hobby/self hosting. But I think that having a free tier for CDN is what makes cloudflare attractive (Among other things).
What would be even nicer:
- Make your privacy policy less shady so we're sure you're not sending data to Hyperscalers subject to Cloud Act
- Support the Vary header so we can build a real, self hosted, european Vercel alternative
Amazing, thanks for doing that. I just moved all my websites to Bunny CDN a couple of months ago, and I couldn't be happier. Great product, great website and interface.
I do not mind paying for everything as long as there is good ddos protection as getting charged for stuff I cannot help is an immediate cancel and also I won’t pay, come get me.
So is this just a dns service? I can use their servers to service dns requests? The main webpage unfortunately has a lot of marketing speak that says a lot but doesnt really tell me what it is.
Quote “ At bunny.net, our mission has always been ambitious but focused: help make the internet hop faster.
To do that, we’ve built a massive global network spanning 119 locations and counting. Today, this network powers over 1.5 million websites and consistently delivers some of the fastest content delivery around the globe. But while deploying thousands of servers globally is an impressive feat on its own, the hardware itself does not explain how bunny.net is able to deliver such an impressive level of performance.
The real secret hides under the hood, embedded in the routing engine that directs every request, every user, and sends traffic exactly where it needs to go. That engine is Bunny DNS”
Ok… so what is it? Router? Dns? Software? Service? Upon reading again that para actually sounds a bit like AI slop, could explain it.
Its an authoritative DNS service, so it can host your domains.
Compare with a recursive resolver, like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1, which you can use to resolve domains.
What's nice about Bunny DNS is that they have authoritative nameservers ~everywhere, so resolving is quick everywhere.
But I think in practice this isn't that useful, since if a domain is moderately used, its DNS records will be cached ~everywhere in anycasted recursive resolvers.
You were looking at the website of Bunny, which is a company that offers primarily a CDN service, as well as other related things like compute hosting, object storage, DNS etc.
It's comparable to Cloudflare, if you're familiar with that, though Bunny is based in the EU instead of US.
This post is about their scriptable DNS service, which used to be paid and is now free.
It depends how much EU do you need. ZeroSSL is through HID Global, part of Assa Abloy, a Swedish public company. HID, however, is American according to Wikipedia. Caddy uses ZeroSSL by default.
The mismatch between how great Bunny is giving away free DNS, and the actual reality that I can't open an account and get free DNS from them is jarring and verging on dishonest.
Saying stuff is free when it's not in the small print feels like a distinctly American Tech thing to do, which is an odd angle for a company trying to be an EU alternative to cloudflare.
“As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.”
This is smart. Ensures you have valid payment information, which implies a financial institution is running KYC on your customer. That reduces fraud and abuse while also reducing friction for real users to increase their spend within your ecosystem when a new product catches their eye.
Just responding to Lapsa here - yes, you're shadowbanned. I looked into your post history and it looks like you were banned after making posts on unrelated threads about microwave transmissions causing auitory hallucinations. Dang directly said to you that he'd banned your account:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173429#48176202
All posts since then have come up dead, except for one about Factorio for some reason.
On a side note, Lapsa, you can test your theory about microwave transmissions fairly easily by simply going inside of a faraday cage. Simplest method I can think of is to go to the hardware/furniture store and stand in a metal storage cabinet. If you can still hear the voices, then it means they're not being transmitted from external microwaves - a microwave capable of causing the Frey Effect can't penetrate thicker metal like that unless there are gaps of ~1cm or more.
If others could please downvote this comment so that it goes to the bottom and he can see it, that would be greatly appreciated!
Agreed. Their privacy page even says they'll remove data if you withdraw consent, but they don't ask for consent. They also don't mention any you could object to data processing, claiming that "Processing is necessary to perform a contract with the data subject and to take steps toward the conclusion of a business relationship." which is a very contorted interpretation; taking steps towards the conclusion is about making quotes and such. It makes me sour on their claims "Keep your data private, compliant, and fully in the EU. As a privacy-first European company, we help you stay aligned with GDPR. No surprises. Full transparency."
Wow they made something free that I’ve used for 30+ years and have never paid for in my life. Amazing, what an accomplishment! What Herculean effort it must have taken!
A lot of providers have basic DNS for free but charge for more sophisticated uses like geo routing. AWS charges for every single thing:
https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/
I refuse to use Cloudflare for two reasons:
1) It’s free until it’s not and they don’t tell you where that limit is.
2) If something goes wrong you cannot contact anyone unless you have an enterprise agreement. Just paying them money is not enough to be able to speak to a person. I had serious issues with R2 and had no-one to contact. They have a Discord and you see people posting the same issues over and over again that never get fixed.
We've asked you before to avoid comments like this, but you continue posting low-substance or inflammatory comments, including several containing barbs about nationalities/regions. This has to stop if you want to keep participating here. HN is for curious conversation, not battle, sneering and snark. When people keep commenting like this we have to assume they want to be banned, so we'll have to go ahead and do that if it happens again. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Kudos to the BunnyNet team!
I've always looked for a EU based alternative to Cloudflare; not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company, but pushing for and testing EU services is important particularly in the light of recent developments in EU-US geopolitics.
The problem is that many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart. Consider Hetzner as an example: how can you imagine being competitive with US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) by raising the prices so much, in such a short time, with so little previous communication to your customers?
BunnyNet on the other hand is being competitive and this move is in the right direction. Of course their free tier is not comparable to Cloudflare (they are two different companies, with different profiles in terms of debt, cash in hand and so on), but it doesn't need to be for small projects.
I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
Well that's a strange way of expressing competitiveness when Hetzner is still vastly cheaper than those 3 cloud providers, despite those cost increases.
They are vastly cheaper even than their actual competition in the US like Digital Ocean.
edit:
Actually I had completely missed the most recent price update. I made this comment referring to April 1st pricing.
I did not receive a communication about the June 15th update, because it did not apply to existing resources.
This gives the breakdown:
https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...
I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.
There is also large premium for hosting in Ashburn compared to Europe for the CPX line, which are the shared/subscribed tier. The SKUs are different so its not directly comparable but for example CPX32 (4vCPU/8GB) is 35.49 EUR in Falkenstein but a CPX31 (4vCPU/8GB) is 62.49 EUR in Ashburn and has far less bandwidth.
Not sure. They were cheaper than DigitalOcean, to the point where 1 DO instance cost would give you 3 on Hetzner, but now they're at parity, and DO seems to have a better product.
The vps performance is not comparable to a dedicated server. Same cpu’s still means twice as slow. Also hetzner alllows for much larger servers in terms of memory at still a fraction of do pricing
Why do you think it's a better product? Slicker interface?
Hosted Postgres, hosted K8s, block storage that can IOPS.
The reason I use a VPS is to not use hosted anything, personally. So I guess whether that makes it a better product or not is highly personal.
Speaking for myself, I used $5 DO droplets for quite a while when learning but as soon as I switched to real projects and realized how quickly the price ramped up, I moved to Hetzner and the simplicity of their interface was a breath of fresh air. I saved a ton of time after switching. So to me, Hetzner has the superior product.
For the most part I agree but poor performance on network block storage is very limiting. Also there is no object store service available in Ashburn, its only in EU. My point is more that DO has a complete modern cloud platform, and Hetzner doesn't quite.
Probably more versatile. Hetzner is just VPSes. They do not offer any PaaS product like managed DBs, managed Redis, wahtever.
That is shockingly more expensive. Damn, rip hetzner.
Yes Hetzner is still vastly cheaper option but there are better options now compared to hetzner and the issue is the way that they handled the pricing.
Its just simply unsustainable and burns a lot of trust/good will if you increase your prices 3x in such a short period of time
Trust me when I say this but Hetzner really belonged in its category previously. I had scoured almost everything and nothing could provide the scale at price Hetzner did back then but now I would say that its simply not true anymore and that there might be better options out there for what its worth.
I am really sad for Hetzner as I really enjoyed them and always wanted to build on top of them but looks like all good things come to an end :-(
Are you a Hetzner customer? I'm a Hetzner customer, and my prices did not increase by 3x (it was more like 1.25x) and the price increase was communicated months in advance and several times. I am running stuff on their older infra, so maybe they handled it differently? When hardwares price go up at least 4x for storage and ram, I don't see how you can avoid price increases and they are still one of the cheaper/cheapest options for what I need.
I am a Hetzner customer. I was in the middle of migrating infrastructure from DigitalOcean to Hetzner, most of all because DO's i/o on their droplets has been abysmal for a long time now.
Hetzner's latest price increase doubled-to-tripled the costs of any new resources I would deploy there. I've now halted the migration and I am seriously considering going all the way back to colo.
This most recent price increase was not communicated months in advance. I'm kind of wondering if you're thinking of the other price increase that happened this year, and not the most recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540844
Existing instances don't get a new price until you resize them.
Certain things went up more severely than others. CPX VMs went up by close to 3x, for example, whereas CX VMs didn't. Which is strange, because the justification they gave was about RAM/Disk prices, not CPU.
It depends on the product.
I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.
My frugality had made me found cheaper options than Hetzner (at the cost of my sanity /jk)
But, hetzner was a really solid deal especially for larger specs, literally nothing could compete with it as I used to make literal lists of providers in my head that can compete against Hetzner/ovhcloud and there were none. They were so good, too good in fact and I had actually felt like they were so giant that they would be able to survive the ramflation and it would be the small shops who would be hurt the most but turns out that although yes small shops are hurt, even the largest of giants like Hetzner couldn't resist the Ramflation and were (forced?) for price increase whereas incredibly I have found small shops to still somehow be more resistant/competitive than the larger beasts.
Pardon me if I am wrong, which I usually am, but aren't there price differences between pre-existing customers and new customers as well, atleast if I am remembering it correctly.
@AussieWog93's comments also make sense in terms of somethings going up by 3x. There seems to be a general consensus online from my limited understanding that some if not many products have increased their prices quite substantially.
mind sharing what you found in your search losing your sanity? :D
there's a few like https://lowendtalk.com https://serversearcher.com
This is a goldmine for cheap deals
https://lowendtalk.com
Also: https://lowendbox.com/
https://contabo.com/en/ Has been good for my mess around and hobby stuff
Contabo does have some steal factor involved, unfortunately and their support times aren't great though many people have quite differing and polarizing experience about them or so I have heard as I haven't really tried them personally.
But its good that contabo is able to be working for ya, They are quite price competitive and the issue with them as said prior really isn't their price so much as though all the other things.
So I am happy for you that it works out for you in the end! :-D
I have tried to discuss all of it in an other comment that I have written: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48658046 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664139
Hope it is able to be of help and it helps ya, take care!
>When hardwares price go up at least 4x for storage and ram, I don't see how you can avoid price increases
You said you are on older infra? So why did they increase your costs 1.25x?
That old hardware has long depreciated and paid itself back many times over and you run a higher risk of an outage due to components wearing out over time.
You should be asking for a discount!
I suspect that the pressure on this old infra had increased (because the customers started moving onto it); from the market POV it makes sense to put a bit more pressure on the customer tbh.
Hetzner can't magically buy cheap hardware and prices have multiplied the last year.
The problem is that the company is burning existing customers - for whom the hardware has already been long purchased - to subsidize new customers coming in during this time of higher hardware costs.
And burning existing customers costs a lot more than soaking new customers. Churn always costs far more in lost revenue than a slowdown in new customers. Plus, it impacts market image in a deeply negative way.
But existing resources were not affected.
I understand that and I am not denying that but it would be now unfair to say that Hetzner belongs in its own category as there are now other alternatives who do compete with Hetzner in its pricing, who also I suppose weren't able to magically buy cheap hardware but I suppose some of them might've lucked out with good deals beforehand and spare-capacity.
Overall I am unsure of how much of the thing was under Hetzner's control itself or not in terms of raising the prices given Ramflation but in deep part I am saddened by it rather than angry on the state of how the whole situation turned out to be, and I wish nothing but good for hetzner as they move past this ramflation and hopefully people are able to give a look at some smaller shops as well which are made of mostly lovely people as well.
I hope that more people look at smaller hosting providers in general who were previously unable to compete at the level of hetzner but now are actually able to do so. I recommend trying them out and talking with them and using it for atleast hobby projects and hopefully even serious projects as I know some hosting providers smaller in scale than Hetzner but are something on which I might feel as comfortable as Hetzner on deploying, if not a bit more because sadly for better or for worse Hetzner is quite strict in some aspects.
How are the smaller hosting providers going to buy cheap hardware?
some already have spare capacity, others have better contracts with their vendors and some can provide DDR3 and specialize in that type of ram and some providers are willing to eat the costs to be better competitive and that the future would be better, some are doing things for ideological reasons as they themselves don't wish to raise prices because they want to provide better for the customers (strange I know but I know of one provider who has said that)
Not everything is good though and some providers are in fact dead-pooling as well and shutting down or raising prices but not to the degree of 3 times. They don't have the leverage that Hetzner does and people would simply migrate but both Buyvm and netcup are notable examples of price increase at the levels of 18-20% for most usecases which was still comparatively high back when they were done but understandable because of ram crisis, which is why my understanding of hetzner's price increase stops being a little understandable.
Ram prices are already declining from its peak and its around 2028 when its mentioned to have a glut. So as easy as it is for me to say but the crisis is comparatively short and there have been other costs involved for hosting providers which is declining (cost of IPv4 is declining as AWS,Google and other giants have stopped hoarding/buying even more IPv4)
It's a tough space for hosting provider but I hope I have shown the how part of how they manage it, its not as easy as it was during the 2020's but it is managable with some smart price increases and other mechanisms or so I have heard. I have just recently bought a few 7$/yr vps's from such shared providers. They don't earn too much from the 7$/yr vps's as much as they earn from the word of mouth (TNAHosting ftw) and thinking of it as (amortizing?) advertisement costs.
Which is why considering all of this and the fact that I was a very massive Hetzner fan back in the day pre price increase, I have felt like the way Hetzner has done things just doesn't feel very Hetzner-y and that there were better ways to manage it and even if not, then there are better shops out there welcoming you, waiting for you to give them a shot as well. I have written another comment detailing some other MASSIVE list of providers as well if this interests ya.
What is comparable to Hetzner in price/scale/features?
Scaleway and OVH. Upcloud close second.
Many smaller providers have reasonable price/features but you need to dig in a comparison site or just generally to find them I guess. Like e.g serversearcher.com serverhunter etc
OVH is one
If you want very small servers: either get a 7$/yr vps or (upcloud if all you want is 1gb ram/1core esq server for very lightweight purposes)
The thing after Hetzner's price increase is that there isn't one size fits all anymore and I guess it might not impact people like me who knows in my opinion, many providers but in this situation its a net loss for many who might be paying higher prices. So here is my small list:
if you want vps that are behind nat: @backtogeek at (tierhive.net) is your guy. He's on hackernews as well.
If you want a very small vps with high egress: Upcloud is an interesting option as they provide 33TB (100mbps) even on their smallest machines. Ionos is a good option as well.
Dedirock/host-c are good for storage backup. Don't rely on their reliability or bandwidth but rely on having multiple deplyoments on different such servers for good backups.
Main: OVHCloud/Greencloud/onidel/buyvm and to a lesser degree Netcup as well are some good verdicts. I like layer7 and servarica as well and I have personally talked in direct messages to the person behind loclix.io
I personally use TNAHosting/Avahosting 7$/11$ yr servers respectively as I am idling them. You might be amazed by what 7$ servers can achieve as I usually code in golang/rust which work extremely good, I also host my own mail server on Tnahosting as it has port 25 enabled (though I do this just for fun) and in my lifetime, I also had a Netcup vps for 10$ for 3 months which had 8gb ram and 4 cores and 500 gb HDD.
I use cloudflare tunnels in front of my vps to prevent DDOS, not that my website has a lot of traffic anyway and have previously made custom scripts to manage it easier and I sometimes use zed and zed's remote server to connect to my server especially when I was on my netcup server and I also use micro-editor quite frequently on my vps's.
Oh can't forget xhosts.uk if you want UK vps's. I really feel like they are a good host and I have said their story on HN earlier as well but they sadly had some disabilities but instead of taking the disability check, they wanted to earn and make their own way and so have operated a vps servers because they like doing this. I really have a lot of respect for them.
"instead of taking the easy option and claim all kinds of money from the government for my disabilities I work as much as I can and hope I strike it lucky with the right customers one day."
This is a comment that they had written with me in personal discussions.
Ethernet servers is a good provider if you want port 25 access/mail access from what I've heard about them as they don't usually allow it. Skrime.eu can fit in some of my criterias as well. H4F.net(Riyad) is a respected provider as well.
Advinserver is good as well as they provide the stats of all servers so you can find the amount of steal and other factors and I have heard some people say some good things about them.
Hosting is one of the few businesses which is cooperative and competitive between many of these players and especially on the lower side of things run much on goodwill. There are always some cases of complaints but its a comfy space. You can almost find a specific host which can be best for your use case and it can be worth finding them out. I have tried to give the limited knowledge that I have.
but lets face it, what i have written is probably a brain fart and Its mostly information overload and I dont expect people to change their providers with this but my point is to be more aware about the provider space in general and to find the best provider for your own specific use case.
Feel free to e-mail me (mail in profile) if you have any specific use case and if I could help optimize the bill or give a more specific list of providers who can help in your use case. Price itself isn't the only factor as there are of reputation, steal factor, long term sustainability and many others.
I have spent too much time on such forums (to even a detrimental cost indeed) and I just like sharing the few things that I know. Perhaps I can get someone to save some money as some of these providers have affiliate programs and I can then spend that money to buy more french fries :-D
Have a nice day and take care. Domains are much more simplified though than servers and I recommend people to look at https://tld-list.com if they want to find out about domains.
Quick glance on those two hosters and i cannot find these 7$ / y prices.
Me neither, but I found the $3 option with an even quicker glance.
https://tnahosting.net/hybrid-vps/
These are usually on flash-deals and especially during black fridays and cyber-mondays.
I had bought from TNAhosting during a flash-sale
Even at 7$/yr vps there are multiple providers with layering rates of confidence within the provider.
Here are some resources that I can give:
https://vpspricetracker.com
https://lowendtalk.com
here is a post by a Lowendtalk member about some of these price comparison websites
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/215318/price-comparison-si...
From the post:
https://www.serverhunter.com/
https://serverdeals.cc/
https://vpspricetracker.com
https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/best_vps
https://www.hostfind.co.uk/web-hosting/vps-hosting/
https://hostingsift.com/hosting?type=vps
I also recommend looking at serververify which is a website created by the creator of colocrossing iirc: https://serververify.com
I have personally used serverdeals.cc and vpspricetracker.com in the past and they are some good resources BUT most of what I have snatched are within flash-sales of various kinds, whether just for as providers running it for an advertisement way or when I was using a netcup instance on their christmas/Advent calendar deals.
Hope i am able to help and take care, my friend.
are there US based providers i.e data centers in the US you recommend for cheap VPS like the one the $7/11 year VPS options you mention since most of those are European based ?
I'm a Hetzner customer and this year's price rises have been well communicated.
Everyone's prices have gone up and i checked if i could go elsewhere and they are still cheaper for their quality level. Deffo beat Digital Ocean and cloud overlords like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc for my needs.
I am particularly pleased they locked in my old hosting plan prices after the recent increase. Seems fair. New hardware has skyrocketed in cost so I don't see how you can avoid price increases.
They are competitive price wise, but less competent human wise.
Their lack of user care shows when you start talking to support. I've never had this experience with an US company (except the US giants) where support basically gives me an "it is what it is".
The most recent that really put the cherry on top.
I was planning on dropping them when running out of prepaid credits.
ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.
What is a point of a credit bar (progress bar) of you can go into negative? I went into negative.
There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Which should remain as credits in your account for future use.
But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
Support: paraphrasing "that sounds right". And I could be quoting them with this for almost all 3 times I've interacted with them.
Yes, I am very much unpleased on customer support experience. But they are not unique and a symptom of multiple EU providers I've switched to in the last 3 years.
Not saying there are companies going above and beyond for customer service but getting a human answer at all when spending single-digit euros a month seems impressive enough; then again I am european so certainly biased :)
What would an american provider have done? Changed their pricing model for you?
It is common for support to closely work with product and be able to respond with product roadmap and feature guidance.
At least they can say "we sympathize but it's not a priority" or "it's a medium priority but we don't have a concrete timeline" or at least recommend best practices/workarounds
My website traffic was a couple megabytes per month. I paid them for about 3 years for neglegible usage. Should I have zero expectation for paying because its cheap?
You can be metered or fixed price. Mixing the two in the most inuintive way possible is a true innovation. /s
Other cloud based provider have the option to pay for your usage to the cent. I guess that innovation didn't reach the EU. /s
Assuming they've hosted you for 3 full years, I wouldn't mind the 10 euros. Even small sites need all infra to work. The fact that your site is small only means it costs less in transfer.
My experience with all EU providers so far is yes, you do have to prepay, I think Hetzner for exemple was 20 euros when I signed up years ago?
Most likely they are unwilling to let customers pay later without any guarantee that they're good faith and solvent. Maybe it is a cultural thing? It's only my personal opinion but it never struck me as unreasonable.
Something similar happened to me with twilio - years ago I had a number 'parked' with them, my card expired, they never notified me, account went into arrears, and they cancelled my number. I was quite a special number, a UK '0200' number they'd released somehow, which shouldn't have been released. When they then acquired sendgrid, to add insult to injury I eventually found out that I was blacklisted and had to go through various validation procedures in order to do business with them, which I declined to do.
How much do you pay per month? Never expect a real human tech expert if you only pay 10$/month for something. A human talking to you for 15minutes destroys their entire profit margin on your payments for years. Unless you hit a bug or something in their system, support is expensive.
> ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.
"Our system will automatically send multiple warning emails if your account balance drops beyond a certain point" from https://bunny.net/faq
I don't know what that "certain point" is, though.
> There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Yeah, annoying but also understandable because of payment processing fees.
> But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
That's incorrect, if you have zones, then you get billed €1/mo, if you don't have anything, then you aren't billed anything... this is my billing history:
Monthly usage for May, 2026: $1
Monthly usage for February, 2026: $1
Monthly usage for July, 2024: $1
Monthly usage for June, 2024: $1
Monthly usage for July, 2022: $1
First one didn't happen, so I don't know what the threshold is. But don't sell me a credit based system if it can go in the negative. Again for a progress bar that doesn't represent negatives.
You are correct on the billing front. I checked the dashboard and I misremembered the day I switched off my resources. June was a slow moving month and I though it happened last month!
I'll retract my claim in the previous comment if I still can edit.
So you unhappy with their pricing policy, which sounds understandable. But what were you expecting the support to do about this?
Maybe an acknowledgement that is a limitation that they understand and it would be something they could change in the future. Maybe showing understanding that it is surprising that a credit based system goes into negative.
I don't know, this was not the first time I got surprised by their system.
Before that I preloaded my account for a couple of credits (+vat). Then they switched to monthly invoicing (+vat for my existing credit). Basically I got double VATed (?) for the single initial payment. Paid for 12 months upfront only to have to recharge more quickly. Why should it be my problem that they have problems understanding billing and building billing systems?
In the past when I signed up it was advertised as usage based billing with the fixed monthly fee somewhere in the fine print? But there is also some usage minimum because at some point I started getting credits used. But not in the first few months where my traffic was under some threshold.
It doesn't help that they constantly move things around in their website with no clear thought. Like how I was corrected in another comment thread with information that isn't on the expected pages like pricing or terms of service.
Maybe they just lack understanding of user experience. Or I'm just a dumb user. I accept either theory.
edit: honestly I don't know if I was double VAT situation or just became a non VAT except company, and ain't gonna dig that up, but if it's the later they should have swallowed the cost for existing credit because changing expected outcomes mid way is no bueno.
> I've never had this experience with an US company (except the US giants) where support basically gives me an "it is what it is".
Similar US vendors = you're lucky to even get someone to talk to or is too far from the chain to actually know so you get a "generic" answer.
(Before Linode was acquired) I called in and quickly got on the phone with a live human who was very familiar with the product and helpful, and sounded (accent) like US-based support.
At the time I was paying $12/month IIRC.
> I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
That sounds like a GPT trope, and seems a slightly weird thing to say: the only reason I thought you might be choosing it because it was European was because your entire comment talked about how you were looking for EU alternatives, and how Bunny is better than other European alternatives.
Come to think about it, this is exactly the sort of output I would expect if a sales person at Bunny had asked GPT to generate a response to sound authentic whilst pointing out out that Bunny is European and better than Hetzner.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're using AI, because I trust you're a legitimate user, and it's also the sort of thing a legitimate user would say, but the style and tone of your comment feels a bit... uncanny. Sorry!
I think you're confusing this with the more classic "it's not X, but Y" trope. That sentence is a comma splice that I'd expect LLMs to avoid by default.
this might be a case of AI feedback, where people have been exposed to so much AI writing that they are starting to write like AI themselves.
I agree! It might even be an issue on my side, where I'm exposed to AI generated stuff that often that everything starts looking like a trope when it's not.
Either way, I've seen more than enough in this comment section to make me want to avoid bunny for now anyway.
Interesting side thought, dunno if it would give any real indication, but I assume the difference between pasting a bunch of text vs typing each character would seem like a potential indicator (for now) whether someone might have used AI to respond.
If my comment is more than a few sentences, I’ll often type it up in my Notes app and paste it in. It means I don’t lose it if there’s some kind of technical issue, and I don’t run the risk of accidentally fat-fingering the Submit or Reload buttons. I do it with text messages too.
As a general observation, because I can't vouch for who used AI or not, claiming LLM is also a quick way to dismiss things. LLMs learned from human output so it should be obvious to anyone that enough humans write or express ideas in that style that it became the default for LLMs. Ideas were rarely judged on their merit on the internet even before LLMs, this AI age just gave those looking for a shallow dismissal more options.
Here's an answer you can write in Hackernews:
If you want I can make it sound more natural, just let me know and I'll change it!>I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company
yeah, nice try, clanker.
no human being ever said that.
> That sounds like a GPT trope
It sounds natural to me. Remember that most people here are non-native speakers, including OP.
This is how the bourgeoisie win. By getting the intellectuals to fight amongst themselves, not about the ideas in the text that might threaten them, but by an offkilter assessment of the idea's provenance. Come on. Maybe We could argue about immigrants instead?
To be fair, Hetzner didn't change prices for existing services, just for new customers / services added. I think that's a fair and realistic approach.
I guess what this reveals is that they were operating on really tight margins.
As someone who recently switched from Rackspace to Hetzner for my dedicated VPS (albeit before the recent price jump), I am still quite happy with my decision. Apparently they are not raising their prices for existing customers, but even so, their prices are consistent and very clearly laid out, they don't change month-to-month, and their website is incredibly easy to use (both when choosing options, and when doing server management), which is more than I can say for Rackspace lol (or Linode now that they're owned by Akamai)
To be fair, a large fraction of Hetzner's costs will be RAM/SSD prices (since that is what they are selling), and they're in a competitive market, and known to have competitive pricing.
Bunny CDN of course runs on RAM/SSD but their costs are also developing and operating services on top. Their costs are comparatively less impacted by the RAM/SSD issue.
Hetzner might not have raised prices so suddenly if they had similar services.
Indeed, Hetzner DNS has been free for a long time.
The Hetzner price increase was brutal, but the reality is: Hetzner VPS prices are still a fraction of comparable AWS EC2 instances.
>many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart.
I don't think any serious Enterprise account would go with Hetzner today, the service range and depth is simply not comparable to the 3 big clouds. Saving $20 on a VPS is not going to be a deciding factor for Enterprise accounts, they want mature, manage services.
The few EU clouds that do have a comparable range of managed services also have AWS-like pricing: https://eualternative.eu/eu-cloud-comparison/
> not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company,
Great for what? Centralizing the internet? making it impossible to exercise your rights to delete your account? Not making alternative plans when one line of change breaks many services?
+1 (828) 660-1813 seems American, no?
The sales number is American, but the company is Slovenian.
Just looked at their website, they don't do many loss leaders as others, for example others offer free static site hosting.
But they are a private company with only one small $6m funding round back in 2022, so I think they are more focused on building organically and not chasing investor funded growth.
Good luck to Bunny!
They also have prepaid plans so that you have no risk of runaway metered costs
They have a $1 minimum spend across all services. You can effectively host unlimited static sites for $1.
You can host static sites with no cost in multiple provider like cloudflare Page, Github Page etc.
I would spend a dollar I'd it meant avoiding both of those companies.
Bunny is EU-based afaik, the ones you mention are not.
It sounds like they made it free for customers for up to 500 domains. It also sounds like they were charging for DNS resolution before? Or is it DNS hosting?
>So, we’ve eliminated DNS query fees entirely.
> Bunny DNS no longer charges for DNS queries and includes free DNS hosting for up to 500 domains per account. There are no query limits, no per-request billing, and no critical features hidden behind enterprise plans. (Yes, that includes smart records and health monitoring too.)
>As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.
Oh..kayy.
> It also sounds like they were charging for DNS resolution before? Or is it DNS hosting?
High end DNS hosting is often billed around the number of queries, number of zones, and number of records, number of special names with fancy features, etc. If you're switching from other DNS hosting, you might not even know what the query volume is, so that's kind of exciting when you need to make a switch.
If you were paying per query and the cost was too high, raising TTLs and consolidating services onto fewer hostnames are pretty achievable ways to reduce the query volume, so it is something you have some control over.
They were charging for nameserver hosting. The main draw are some advanced programmatic features for (geo) routing, scripting, etc.
The one dollar thing isn’t as bad in practice as it sounds since it covers everything. Basically invoice minimum across everything so if you’re using the platform in any meaningful way it’s a non issue
It is bad, because I don't use Bunny for anything else and so this made it paid DNS for me, so when I was migrating DNS a few months ago it made me rule them out.
The 1 dollar thing, I think, looks exceptionally bad because it shows that what Bunny says can't be taken at face value.
The fact is we're here because they posted a blog talking about how great they are making DNS free "because a faster internet won’t build itself".
But now I've just learnt from comments on HN that Bunny DNS isn't free.
They've lost my trust before they even had it.
Besides $1 means you need to give them your credit card from day one. That's probably the only reason they have that minimum limit to begin with.
KYC is a thing in Europe. Internet infrastructure businesses won't do business anonymously as they'd be held liable for anything their anonymous customer did.
Most European hosting providers don't KYC. Infrastructure providers are rarely held liable for customer actions in Europe. Most enforcement around this sort of thing is around sanctions violations (Stark Industries).
Isn't mullvad european?
Yes, but nobody is by default held liable for their anonymous customers. Otherwise you would not be able to buy anything with cash any more.
You don't need a credit card on file, you can prepay and use that balance instead.
I'll also say that I've used around 140 gigs of bandwidth the last two months and my costs has only been <$2. Worth it to me, and doubly worth it to avoid the tyranny of big tech (which includes cloudflare).
Yeah I ruled them out months ago because it was $1, I saw this post and was about to reconsider them and in my case it's the same as it was.
No, this is just a silly take.
AWS can make data export free, and no-one's going to shout at them that it's not free because it cost money to store the data there in the first place.
Bunny offers a number of services to paying customers. One of the services, that would previously have incurred a cost, now does not. It is free.
Huh?
It literally explains this in the blog post
> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.
Sure seems like you’re trying very hard to find a problem here.
If you’re not down with their prepaid/$1 model there is always CF.
You had some - millions (?) of - DNS queries free in the past.
I'm glad to hear the queries are free now! I somehow managed to blow through the free quota, not by like a crazy amount but enough that I started thinking in most circumstances why pay extra for basic dns when registrar's is free? Even barely used domains were getting tons of queries. And I only need the fancy failover feature on a couple domains, though it is nice for those for sure. Anyway with this I don't have to worry about it anymore, so thanks Bunny!
First time I am hearing of paying for DNS resolution but I am just a civilian.
Aws charges for everything including that.
route53 charge somewhere in the region of $0.40 per million queries
Yes. Many others are free with no $1 minimum (e.g. Cloudflare)
I wanted to give Cloudflare a go, but I did not want to move my whole domain. Unfortunately you can only host a subdomain with a paid account.
You only have to have them be your domain's name servers. Domains can stay at another registrar. This is pretty risk-free. They didn't even used to be a registrar until recently and they don't support registering all tlds so this always worked.
something something are the product
Cloudflare's business model appears to be wait till someone is generating lots of bandwidth and then give them 30 days to move up a tier or be closed down.
I've read reports of companies on the business plan being strong armed into signing Enterprise plans with 1 year upfront.
It's a listed company with revenue expectations, and VERY good at marketing itself, but it's free tier of CDN/DDOS to start off with is a good deal.
Cloudflare's business model was to protect DDoS "providers"/booters for free, so DDoS became something everyone had to worry about (before cloudflare they tended to DDoS eachother), and then sell the cure.
Krebs wrote some rather scathing posts about them when they were starting up.
Move up a tier or move somewhere where it costs even more. That seems kinda reasonable, really.
CloudFlare uses that Slack Hack Club model?
Not _quite_ in this case, since the free plan improves everyone's experience: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/
Well except of the people that may solve the damn captchas (:
Their DNS is also scriptable, it’s not just a name server
I want to love Bunny. But I am terrified about being suddenly charged thousands of euros if some unexpected traffic from LLM/crawler activity happens.
As far as I know, Bunny products are their own business units with their own goals and feature requests (Bunny Stream, in particular, lacks a lot of features) and the “block all requests after the bill becomes 50 EUR” ONLY exists for Bunny CDN, not for their other products.
The day Bunny starts treating all their products evenly (and listen to requests asking to implement basic features) will be the day I will switch all my nonprofit communities to their services.
You wouldn’t be charged thousands because the service is pre-paid. Your websites will be suspended once the balance runs out, but you can re-establish them once you add more balance.
AFAIK is the only provider in which you can have functional billing limits and not just alerts that still depend on you reacting on them in time.
It's not purely prepaid otherwise I wouldn't be charged into negative (see my other comment in this thread).
It’s not like they’re going to put a debt collector after the $0.73 that you’d owe, so I’m not sure what was your point. If you want the services to continue you gotta have some balance. If they allow your account to run below balance I’d say that’s on them.
My point was to correct one claim in your previous comment.
It's not an accurate correction. It's prepaid with an ability to incur a small amount of negative balance, partly for protection against downtime or data loss and partly so the systems can have some time to shut off (it would be hard to suspend service immediately across all services). However it is purely prepaid in that they don't provide a postpaid option.
That's a very uncharitable way of dismissing my claim that the parent claim of the service stopping automatically when you go over your credits is not true.
That's one thing. The second thing, I'm happy for you that you have more information about their pricing system than their pricing page and terms of service page state.
It's inaccurate to say that it isn't purely prepaid, because that could be taken to mean that some services are available to be postpaid, with a due date. Here you can see that a negative balance isn't the same sort of thing as having a postpaid bill due: https://support.bunny.net/hc/en-us/articles/8726637076124-My...
So it's not prepaid?
It's not not purely prepaid. It is purely prepaid through I might favor another way of saying it that specifically says that they don't offer any services on a postpaid basis. But even if you define purely prepaid differently from me, it doesn't work so well as a correction because the comment being replied to didn't use the term "purely prepaid" or something highly similar.
Where in the terms of service or in the admin UI do you see this information? You can pre-pay, yes, and the CDN service (and ONLY the CDN service) has a setting to stop the billing. But the other services do not seem to have a limit on how much you can get billed.
I don't have a credit card on file, I'm not sure how they are going get paid if my balance goes negative.
Also: https://support.bunny.net/hc/en-us/articles/360000235911-How...
But yes, other services will run until your account is dry, then it gets suspended. You can't set a spend limit on your scripts without it taking down the whole account. You can't do cost optimization, but at least you are protected from going bankrupt.
Problem is, Cloudflare's free tier plan effectively sets the limit to $0.
Exactly!
I once had some pretty serious DoS attack, but fortunately, I didn't had to pay more than what was pre-paid.
I’m not sure which Bunny service you’re referring to specifically but Bunny Shield can mitigate DDOS attacks and block bots.
> I want to love Bunny. But I am terrified about being suddenly charged thousands of euros if some unexpected traffic from LLM/crawler activity happens.
If it's just some simple website, then LLM/crawlers probably won't get you anywhere near thousands of euros. The CDN costs $0.01 - $0.06 per GB
...
You can limit some of their services, like the CDN (which is the most important one in my opinion):
- Download speed limit
- Requests per IP
- Data transfer per IP
- Max connections per IP
And monthly bandwidth limit, which disables the zone if you reach x GB.
The first few hundred words on that page does not explain why I should care about this, and amazingly neither does the comments here on HN.
Top Comment
> EU based alternative to Cloudflare
Curious if bunny.net offers any measurable DNS performance improvements over Cloudflare or vice versa.
Kudos to Bunny.net!
I'm really waiting for a streamlined static website hosting experience to move everything to Bunny. At the moment, Cloudflare Pages is still much more straightforward with one CLI command to deploy a website.
Also, we are using Bunny containers with our global API gateway with 16 worldwide locations and it is really crazy - the cost is $3.60/mo (Go backend + Bunny billing based on resource utilization, not provisioning). With a relatively small usage of 20k API requests/mo, it's still stupidly cheap.
I hope this might be of use to you, it's exactly that, one-command deployments. :) It's still early, but I'm using it across my deployments and it works pretty flawlessly.
https://tangled.org/bruceroettgers.eu/bunnyup
nice, I will check it out!
For the people asking what kind of DNS service this is, content or proxy: You have to look 'Bunny DNS' up in the products menu and from there follow the hyperlink to the doco.
* https://docs.bunny.net/dns
So it's content DNS service; with server-side resource record shuffling; and with JavaScript, and badly written examples that don't check the question type, just to make it weird.
I am seeing way to many "Performing security verification This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot." from Cloudfare these days. It strikes me that, if it has verified my client once, it should hold off at least for a day or so before putting me through that hoop again. How does Bunny DNS deal with bot protection?
Wasn't Privacy Pass supposed to fix this? Let the browser generate and store some PoW or something that it hands off to the site, so each site doesn't have to do the same thing.
https://github.com/cloudflare/pp-browser-extension seems kind of dead (a dependabot zombie).
eta: I completely missed this two days ago: https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudfl...
I have the same experience, and I ended up removing Cloudflare from the websites I manage since there were too many complaints from users with shared connections or exotic browsers.
Not sure if you're talking about different sites or same one. If different sites, it doesn't make much sense to add that feature because site owners would rarely (if ever) want it. If same site, blame again the site owner who has the ability to configure challenge cookie expiry.
Their website loads really fast. Its sad that this is remarkable, but it really is.
Damn!! I just tried a few links from navbar... all loaded in an instant like they have already been cached, even though they were not (since I use firefox in full private mode, and haven't visited their site in like months before today).
Damn, you're right. Ugh, everything else is truly molasses.
Very nice and a great service. I wish there API Keys were scoped however so setting up continuous deployments doesn't risk your, say, MX records getting changed if the key is leaked. And it would be very awesome if they would support IPv6-only origins for the CDN.
Hey! Thanks for the feedback.
We're doing discovery on API key scopes at the moment, we don't yet have a public ETA for this but rest assured it's being worked on!
Regarding IPv6-only origin support, We brought this in just last week! We now support IPv6-only addresses direct as an origin, as a hostname, as well as dual stack hostname resolution.
Best, Joe
Hey Joe, just to pile on...
If you had have supported API key scoping then I'd have a ton of businesses/startups running on you. As it stands currently it's difficult for me to recommend you to orgs that are scaling up. Compliance in particular was the biggest issue. For one-man shops it's a no-brainer.
In your defense, Cloudflare has historically also sucked in this area.
Anyways, I'm looking forward to this feature!
That's awesome to hear, thanks!
It would be awesome if the API would get more robust and documented in general -- right now it seems some params seem to not really work (ex storage zone search), and other endpoints take so many without much clarity over what will be set as the default and what's required. I found that for most calls I needed to check the network requests from the dashboard to see how to use them, would be awesome to have more documentation and examples here showing common flows.
Hello Joe.
How does the USD1 minimum works? Say I have setup a pull zone and i don't use it for over a month, I get charged anyway?
Thanks.
Yes. You‘re getting charged. But a dollar for your entire bunny account (not for every service or domain) is not that much to ask for.
When the comparison is literally every other cloud provider who all charge by usage only, then anything more than $0.00 is in my opinion too much to ask for.
I’ve been using cloud services in one way or another from different providers (including EU based like Hetzner) and never seen this before. It’s always been pay for what you use and nothing more, which is kind of the whole pitch of cloud services.
I wish for the sme. Right now I‘ve created specialized edge functions to e.g. make a deployment which has the global access key.
So, my scripts on my servers dont have the bunny api key. Its only saved within those edge functions and I authenticate against the edge functions.
A little bit more effort than scoped keys but it works
On the other hand, I was using Bunny DNS free for years, and now I have to pay $1/month to use it. Need to migrate somewhere else.
It's nothing new to make a DNS service free, but still kudos to Bunny. I moved to Bunny CDN couple of months ago from CF and it's been great so far. They don't have all that fancy things that CF has, but I guess it's also not their target. It's a great and extremely fast CDN that makes it easy to host many kind of websites. They also have things like Edge Rules, WAF, Cache Control etc.
I deploy my website using their API. So on every push, GitHub Actions builds it and copies the dist/ to Bunny and purges the cache afterwards. Everything has been working perfectly. I can only recommend. It's also quite easy if you don't know about the modern way of doing things and just want to use an FTP to put your website online. Especially attractive for IndieWeb folks.
I'm using Bunny DNS and it's been mostly unremarkable (which is a very good thing for a DNS provider)!
The only annoyance is that their domain import auto-detects existing records, but it seems to miss a lot of them so you end up manually copying a lot of things over anyway.
In their defence, nobody can implement auto-detecting domains well, because there's no way to efficiently enumerate DNS records.
(Excluding NSEC-style enumeration, which is not always available.)
I feel like I'm missing something, AXFR?
Almost no mainstream existing provider you’re migrating from would support AXFR from Bunny’s servers. But yes, AXFR would be the ideal solution in a perfect world.
iirc at least some providers let you whitelist AXFR for migrating away from them, but seems like it is usually only if you pay enough (i. e. restricted to enterprise plans).
Since it's much rarer than I thought, I guess it makes sense bunny haven't implemented support for ingesting with AXFR.
That's not their fault, though. There's no perfectly reliable way to enumerate the DNS records for a particular domain.
I'm a BunnyDNS user and wanted to share a warning - the import from a zone file can drop records silently, and the export will fail to export some of your records. I reported bugs some months ago, they replied they've fixed some but it's still a problem.
Spirit: ensure you keep a good copy of your zone files (bind format), their import / export has issues (it also doesn't include SOA or NS records). I spent time (before the recent fixes) manually validating records.
> Bunny DNS no longer charges for DNS queries
I've owned domains for ~20 years... I'm okay for paying for the domain, I'm okay with some of that money being used to maintain the DNS servers... I've never had a company charge for queries. Why would they do that?
Serving static records with reasonable TTLs (so you get caching) is pretty much always free.
Dynamic, geo routed, load balanced low TTL queries tend to have a fee.
Well, AWS is an example of provide who does charges for it, starting at $0.4/million queries...
GeoDNS often isn't free.
I read this headline as "DNS free" and was intrigued, like they would be distributing hosts files or something.
This is good news! For anybody wondering, there is a terraform provider available.
https://registry.terraform.io/providers/BunnyWay/bunnynet/la...
Wait, someone paid them for DNS before? It was many FREE DNS services since early 00's, I even will not say nothing about the domain names registrants who almost always (with literally few exceptions) provides free DNS.
Uh, paying for DNS isn't uncommon? Examples off the top of my head:
- Akamai DNS
- AWS Route 53
- Azure DNS
- Cloudflare (excluding personal/hobbyist plan)
- Google Cloud DNS
And many, many others. And I note the site you posted this comment on is using Route 53, so probably paid as I doubt their query volume would be in the free tier.
Paying for DNS for personal/hobby stuff is probably pretty uncommon, because like you say, most domain registrars will offer it for free. But commercial websites often will, particularly larger ones with serious traffic.
Domain Registrars usually have shitty, subpar DNS eg. without Anycast or DNSSEC.
If i have understood correctly, Anycast is not feature of DNS but a feature of BGP.
Otherwise, that is my observation also.
I believe they're referring to the DNS servers. The closer they are to the user, the faster a DNS resolution happens.
A good provider will have different locations across the world, and users connect to the nearest datacentre. The free DNS some domain registrars offer is, sometimes, hosted at one single location. If the server is in the US and the user is in Europe, you're adding 80-150ms to requests. If they use "anycast" servers, the user could connect to a server 1-20ms away.
Amazon Route 53 is $0.40 per million DNS queries - which would terrify me if I used it, considering a typical 10Gbit server connection hosted at a unscrupulous ASN with no egress IP filtering is capable of sending a million DNS requests per second from random spoofed IP addresses.
I just signed up. The website (despite saying it's free here) has numerous banners of trials and free credits. Not quite what I was expecting from 'free'
They offer more services than just DNS.. their DNS service is "free", their other services aren't.
I love bunny so much - I host 10+ (Hugo) websites there and I pay basically nothing (+ CDN, DNS, ...).
Have you managed to turn everything off? I had been playing with magic containers, turned everything off and then discovered every month I was charged 1usd + vat for nothing. A bit annoying.
There seems to be a $1 minimum charge on all accounts, regardless of whether or not you use them[1]
[1] https://bunny.net/pricing/#:~:text=%241%20monthly%20minimum
Yes, that is what I pay ("basically nothing")
So "free DNS hosting" is misleading marketing? (I signed up but wasn't asked for credit card info).
IIUC this is by design. If you have an account with them you will pay at least $1/month. The only way to get rid of this is to delete the account.
TBF you can keep the account dormant if you delete all the resources. I have like $3 in balance left for over a year now.
From TFA:
> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend
how do you pay nothing? As CDN isn't free?
Correct. In Bunny you have a $1/month minimum cost. I guess that's so low for them, that it's kinda nothing.
Amazing news!
The one thing I wish they’d support is multiple zones and an RBAC system to grant certain users access to specific zones. If they’d offer that they’d be a serious contender to replace Cloudflare and AWS/GCP DNS
We use bunny as our CDN provider at Bluesky, and I have had a very positive experience! Team is great, service is great, price is great.
Their claim is that they are European, but I see a US support hotline in the footer and all prices are in Dollar. Seems to be targeting the US market (which is smart), but I don't know whether the European angle wins there.
Yay! I love Bunny DNS!
Free secondary or are people supposed to make them primary and manage their DNS through Bunny? If primary that is the same sales technique Cloudflare used. It works, once one's DNS is managed there enabling CDN features is just clicking buttons.
I've dug into this a bit and I'd say the answer is no, they do not support being used as a secondary.
This is nice, I have some nameservers pointing to Hetzner so I can use Caddy to do domain validation via API and get https (with dedicated domains) on private LANs. But the Hetzner API keys are horribly, uncomfortably over-scoped and I haven't found a way to reduce that.
At least when I do DNS at bunny, a leaked key can't rent VMs on my CC. And I prefer EU infra (cloudflare works great though for this usecase). Who knows that my bunny account can grow into ;)
So what’s the functional difference to Cloudflare (free) DNS? Anything besides „this is European“ that makes me want to switch?
I just discovered bunny.net thanks to this post. I'd be happy to move my static websites on bunny.net, but is it possible (like on cloudflare) to map requests to /foo to the foo.html file ? According to what I read on the documentation it is not a edge rule.
Pardon my ignorance but am curious what is an "edge rule"? Is it a tech-related term (i.e. edge case) or a figure of speech?
"Edge" was the new "client", now it's everything outside your own servers, or at the border between your server and everyone else.
See also: Edge Computing
Faster name resolution is chasing a local maximum. The better path to improving the internet is to rely on DNS less and content addressing more, that way content stays accessible as long as somebody on your part of the network has it.
Something still has to locate the resource you want, and that will involve something equivalent to DNS.
Sure but it's a different game if instead of finding the machine that has the data, it can find any machine that has the data. That machine might be elsewhere on your lan or elsewhere in your city.
But that's not how DNS works. It does not find /the/ node that matches the host element of the resource. It finds a list of nodes (often a subset of eligible nodes).
I have been fed up with DNSimple for a long time. Can any folks share positive experiences with Bunny?
I can finally automate our wildcard certs. Our current DNS host doesn’t have an API.
I think it is a step in the right direction for bunny to be a competitive for the people on hobby/self hosting. But I think that having a free tier for CDN is what makes cloudflare attractive (Among other things).
What would be even nicer: - Make your privacy policy less shady so we're sure you're not sending data to Hyperscalers subject to Cloud Act - Support the Vary header so we can build a real, self hosted, european Vercel alternative
Amazing, thanks for doing that. I just moved all my websites to Bunny CDN a couple of months ago, and I couldn't be happier. Great product, great website and interface.
Great news, but CDN doesn't have free tier like Cloudflare's unfortunately, so not an option for my projects ATM.
I do not mind paying for everything as long as there is good ddos protection as getting charged for stuff I cannot help is an immediate cancel and also I won’t pay, come get me.
200,000,000,000÷30÷24÷60÷60÷119
648 queries/second/location.
Obviously not all locations are equal and not all seconds or minutes of the day are.
Indeed an impressive scale.
How would I quantitatively test which dns server is the fastest one available to me?
So is this just a dns service? I can use their servers to service dns requests? The main webpage unfortunately has a lot of marketing speak that says a lot but doesnt really tell me what it is.
Quote “ At bunny.net, our mission has always been ambitious but focused: help make the internet hop faster.
To do that, we’ve built a massive global network spanning 119 locations and counting. Today, this network powers over 1.5 million websites and consistently delivers some of the fastest content delivery around the globe. But while deploying thousands of servers globally is an impressive feat on its own, the hardware itself does not explain how bunny.net is able to deliver such an impressive level of performance.
The real secret hides under the hood, embedded in the routing engine that directs every request, every user, and sends traffic exactly where it needs to go. That engine is Bunny DNS”
Ok… so what is it? Router? Dns? Software? Service? Upon reading again that para actually sounds a bit like AI slop, could explain it.
Its an authoritative DNS service, so it can host your domains.
Compare with a recursive resolver, like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1, which you can use to resolve domains.
What's nice about Bunny DNS is that they have authoritative nameservers ~everywhere, so resolving is quick everywhere.
But I think in practice this isn't that useful, since if a domain is moderately used, its DNS records will be cached ~everywhere in anycasted recursive resolvers.
You were looking at the website of Bunny, which is a company that offers primarily a CDN service, as well as other related things like compute hosting, object storage, DNS etc.
It's comparable to Cloudflare, if you're familiar with that, though Bunny is based in the EU instead of US.
This post is about their scriptable DNS service, which used to be paid and is now free.
I wish they provided an alternative to Cloudflare WARP as well.
Not entirely free. Bunny account it-self costs 12$/year.
seems both Bunny & Cloudflare - both have a SQLite product - has anyone used the sqlite products ? & what are your thoughts & opinions
Interesting, but I have too much stuff configured in Cloudflare :<
All the more reason to use this? :)
Now we just need a EU based alternative to Let's Encrypt
It depends how much EU do you need. ZeroSSL is through HID Global, part of Assa Abloy, a Swedish public company. HID, however, is American according to Wikipedia. Caddy uses ZeroSSL by default.
If you want only single host certificates, Actalis is Italian and issues free ones as well: https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/wiki/Actalis.com-...
Is this faster than Cloudflare?
The mismatch between how great Bunny is giving away free DNS, and the actual reality that I can't open an account and get free DNS from them is jarring and verging on dishonest.
Saying stuff is free when it's not in the small print feels like a distinctly American Tech thing to do, which is an odd angle for a company trying to be an EU alternative to cloudflare.
Bunny.net is awesome!
really excited for bunny, i am sure things (dns import) would be fixed eventually
> We implemented DNSSEC with NSEC Black Lies
That's pretty cool. Learned something new today.
Best wishes in your new business model!
Biggest feature is dns loadbalancing.
I'm pretty bummed I never got hired at BunnyNet. Seems like such a cool company to work for, and I ticked their boxes in the application
“As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.”
This is smart. Ensures you have valid payment information, which implies a financial institution is running KYC on your customer. That reduces fraud and abuse while also reducing friction for real users to increase their spend within your ecosystem when a new product catches their eye.
They use .NET. Considering this choice, I doubt they will ever be as good as Cloudflare
Just responding to Lapsa here - yes, you're shadowbanned. I looked into your post history and it looks like you were banned after making posts on unrelated threads about microwave transmissions causing auitory hallucinations. Dang directly said to you that he'd banned your account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173429#48176202
All posts since then have come up dead, except for one about Factorio for some reason.
On a side note, Lapsa, you can test your theory about microwave transmissions fairly easily by simply going inside of a faraday cage. Simplest method I can think of is to go to the hardware/furniture store and stand in a metal storage cabinet. If you can still hear the voices, then it means they're not being transmitted from external microwaves - a microwave capable of causing the Frey Effect can't penetrate thicker metal like that unless there are gaps of ~1cm or more.
If others could please downvote this comment so that it goes to the bottom and he can see it, that would be greatly appreciated!
Excellent commercial move!
Nice thank you so much!
so its authoritative dns and not free dns resolution like 1.1.1.1
Finally! Now it becomes economic for us to make the move! Goodbye CloudFlare!
how do they compare to cloudflare? It would be nice to see a comparison chart
more competition is a good thing, always welcome for alternative
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That's not the cookie banner. It was just a pop-up that said "Built in the EU" and goes on about how they're privacy-first, transparent, etc...
This is the cookie banner: https://i.imgur.com/CIBQBib.png
This is what you saw: https://i.imgur.com/rp6vbLy.png
Too bad, because it basically said they only use necessary cookies.
I suppose you'd have complained if there were no cookie banner as well?
I mean, that cookie popup saying there's no need for a cookie popup is probably there because someone complained there's no cookie popup...
The
"Appreciate it" / "cool carry on"
Is exactly the sort of confusing non choice options cookie banners give. Along the lines of
"Accept all" / "more information"
Then I'll retract my claim but it is bad UX to make a popup on the landing page that looks like an evil cookie banner.
I must agree the text on the buttons confused me too, but considering the article title and the first few comments I stopped and read the pop-up text.
I’m in the habit of going interesting title -> skim a few comments -> then decide whether I should click on the article
What you're referring to is not a cookie banner at all (I suppose you didn't read the text, only the buttons).
The actual cookie banner merely says "We use cookies to improve your user experience. Learn more" and has a close button.
Agreed. Their privacy page even says they'll remove data if you withdraw consent, but they don't ask for consent. They also don't mention any you could object to data processing, claiming that "Processing is necessary to perform a contract with the data subject and to take steps toward the conclusion of a business relationship." which is a very contorted interpretation; taking steps towards the conclusion is about making quotes and such. It makes me sour on their claims "Keep your data private, compliant, and fully in the EU. As a privacy-first European company, we help you stay aligned with GDPR. No surprises. Full transparency."
congrats
Wow they made something free that I’ve used for 30+ years and have never paid for in my life. Amazing, what an accomplishment! What Herculean effort it must have taken!
What the hell am I missing here?
A lot of providers have basic DNS for free but charge for more sophisticated uses like geo routing. AWS charges for every single thing: https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/
I refuse to use Cloudflare for two reasons:
1) It’s free until it’s not and they don’t tell you where that limit is.
2) If something goes wrong you cannot contact anyone unless you have an enterprise agreement. Just paying them money is not enough to be able to speak to a person. I had serious issues with R2 and had no-one to contact. They have a Discord and you see people posting the same issues over and over again that never get fixed.
a free dns service? wow that's insane.
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We've asked you before to avoid comments like this, but you continue posting low-substance or inflammatory comments, including several containing barbs about nationalities/regions. This has to stop if you want to keep participating here. HN is for curious conversation, not battle, sneering and snark. When people keep commenting like this we have to assume they want to be banned, so we'll have to go ahead and do that if it happens again. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661023 and marked it off topic.