Exploring Bunny CDN and DNS

After playing around with Linode/Cloudflare and S3/CloudFront (AWS) for self-hosted 'serverless' options the other day,¹ I kept coming back to this preoccupation. One thing driving me to do so being my desire to extract myself from Cloudflare - something that would require three things:

• a good DNS provider
• a CDN service that offers various levels of customisability
• reasonable affordability

Being truthful, AWS hits on all of these points. I quite like diversifying choices though: the world runs on Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, etc. Businesses need solid, reliable, dependable, predictable infrastructure - but I don't.

Anyways, I came across bunny.net and have been quite impressed. Initially it was only a CDN, but they've increased their offering to include streaming, DNS, image processing, fonts and storage. They're based in Europe (Slovenia, if I've understood rightly), so it's nice using a service that is primarily geared towards EU use. They do not have a free tier - so you pay for usage right from the beginning. I like this as it's clear, straightforward, no nonsense.

I really like a centralised place for DNS management. I own something like nine domains, bought from various domain registrars. Some domains/subdomains I use for playing around, testing things - usually involving lots of changes in a short period of time. I like just having one place to go. Some DNS managers really are slow to propagate changes (Linode, Namecheap, Fasthosts - to name the three I've tried), so I want a DNS management solution that keeps up. Cloudflare is damn good at that, in fairness. But - so far - so is Bunny DNS! It's damn quick actually. I could see Bunny being a one-stop, reliable solution for managing DNS records for a number of domains.

As a point of interest, I came across this DNS performance rating page. At the point of writing Bunny DNS is in 10th place across the world (sixth in Europe) for raw performance, first overall for both uptime and quality in the world.

Then the CDN side of things is pretty impressive, very performant and offering lots of customisability. Compared with the likes of AWS or Cloudflare, it's not the nicest user experience in terms of getting set up, but that's not a big deal. I might add that Hugo starter project I used for the Cloudflare/Linode/AWS post recently to Bunny - it'd be interesting to compare numbers.

So, having played around for a wee while - I'm not seeing much if anything that Bunny won't offer me that Route 53 and CloudFront will. You can do load balancing, load by geoproximity, detailed cache controls, custom rules.

Fully moving away from Cloudflare for DNS management will take a bit of time, but as things stand I'm fairly well set on doing so.