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Finding the best provider for CDN IPFS Resized Images

16th Nov 2022
 

Our current setup is IPFS with Pinata and Fastly as a CDN.

We chose to use Fastly as an Image CDN because it is cheaper and was a good option to mitigate the billing constraints of Pinata.

Now we see that Fastly is also kind of expensive, and it might be just as reasonable to negotiate a good price with Pinata.

How much should you pay for bandwidth?

In an article by CloudFlare, they stated that AWS charges way too much for bandwidth.

But how much is normal?

CloudFlare doesn’t have a public pricing model. Is that a bad sign?

One commenter states that they pay between 5k-10k for 70TB and 100m requests on CloudFlare.

AWS cloudflare is on a similar price point: 70TB/100m requests: 5400$

 

Finding an ideal setup for storage and image resizing

For our usecase, we need two things:

  • A place to store our images
  • An image resizing proxy

For the storage, we currently have all our images hosted on IPFS throguh Pinata, so an IPFS compatible provider would be the best.

Some providers do both.

 

Storage.

  • Pinata: 133$/TB (also request limits)
  • Filebase: 6$/TB (no request limits9

Filebase does not have image resizing but feels promising as a good ipfs host without weird limits.

 

Which CDN is the best for image resizing?

  • Fastly: 10$/TB ish
  • imgix: based on origin images
  • Cloudflare: ??
  • BunnyCDN: 10$/TB
  • Pinata: 133$/TB (also: request limits)
 

Conclusion

FileBase is the best provider for IPFS hosted files.

For the image resizing proxy, a good place to start is CloudFlare, because of its free tier. Since your storage is another place, it’s generally easy to switch to another image proxy when needed (Imgix, BunnyCDN, etc…).

This is the setup we’re going for at Layer3:

 
 
 

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