The European Web Part 1: Bunny.net for DNS and CDN
I have been dabbling in the web hosting space for a fat second. If you hadn’t noticed the space is mostly dominated by companies from the U S of A (guns firing, eagles screeching). Lately I’ve been a little tired of the escapades this country has been up to, and the insane amount of power their political figureheads have over my data and services.
Luckily we have alternatives for a fair few services you need to host your website in a speedy and secure manner. While I don’t believe we have any capable hyperscalers (AWS and friends/foes) yet, we Europeans are perfectly capable of hosting traditional virtual servers, DNS services and CDNs on a smaller scale. And honestly that might be all you need for most of your projects.
That being said, hosting your projects this way doesn’t look very sexy on your résumé. Seems European companies (and even governments) are still mostly blind to the looming danger of the US doing something silly and hosting all their stuff overseas (and no, “sovereign” clouds don’t count if a US company is still in the chain). But hey, you can still say you’re a linux admin, know how to use git and maybe even containerize a thing or two. Besides, stuff like Kubernetes works perfectly well on Europe soil as well ;)
This series goes over a few alternatives to US companies you can use to bring your services online. Starting off with Bunny.net, who I use for DNS and CDN services and also for hosting this website.
Service definitions
For some services I’m using abbreviations or acronyms that should be common knowledge to more technically inclined folks. For the rest of us I define them here:
- DNS - Domain Name Service: These providers offer name servers that can be used for your domain, allowing you to host DNS records like A-, CNAME-, MX-, TXT-Records and many others.
- CDN - Content Delivery Network: These providers take files from an origin (usually your web server) and cache them on many PoPs (Points of Presence) so they can be delivered to your end users more quickly.
- WAF - Web Application Firewall: A Web Application Firewall is a service that sits between the end user and your application server (or network) and serves to filter out bad traffic or apply rules to the incoming traffic before they hit your origin.
Bunny.net
| Based in | Slovenia |
| Services | DNS, CDN, WAF, Object Storage, Edge Scripting, Edge Containers, Video Hosting |
| Alternative to | Cloudflare, Akamai |
| Company type | Limited Liability Company (Slovenian: d.o.o) |
| Website | https://bunny.net/ |
I started exploring options outside of Cloudflare because their content policies have made for some dicey situations in the past. Like providing support for platforms taking part in harassment and some other straight-up dangerous content. Plus they recently cut 1100 jobs because of AI which in my eyes is completely unacceptable.
Also, the large amount of recent outages for which they have now finally put something in place that should’ve been in place yonks ago for a company running half the internet.
I’ve been using bunny.net for a while now, starting out with just using it as a CDN backed by Backblaze. But now it’s perfectly capable of providing storage as well. One thing I didn’t like starting out is that they used a non-standard API for their storage zones (their term for a bucket) but they’ve recently added an S3-compatible layer which makes integrating it with other services a lot easier.
Unlike Cloudflare’s pricing plans, Bunny.net is pay-as-you-go with I’d say very reasonable pricing. I wouldn’t say anything apart from their DNS services are necessarily “free” but the bills shouldn’t end up too high.
The interface can use some polish here and there (back when I moved my first domain over they didn’t have a GUI for DNSSEC which luckily they do now). But overall the experience of setting up a new service with them is pretty simple.
- Add your domain
- Import or add your DNS records
- Decide whether a record should use CDN acceleration, this essentially puts it behind Bunny.net systems and sets up a “pull zone” allowing you to configure your service further
- Swap your name servers over
But it is actually absolutely optional to use Bunny.net for your CDN, if you want to just add a Pull Zone and set up a CNAME with your current DNS provider that’s totally cool. Just make sure it’s not going through a proxy (like Cloudflare) already.
For this blog I’ve set up a Storage Zone and a Pull Zone connected to said Storage Zone. From the Pull Zone you can easily add multiple domains the Pull Zone should serve after which you can add a CNAME record at your DNS provider (Bunny.net or anyone else). I do wish that when you attach, to a Pull Zone, a domain with DNS services at Bunny.net that it would automatically set up the CNAME record because for now that process seems fairly disjointed. This makes it so that you end up with DNS records without any indication that it’s connected to a Pull Zone
Overall I’m pretty happy with the setup and the Forgejo Actions workflow I use for deploying the site. Massively helped by the BunnyCDN-storage-deploy action by Ara Yeressian. Although now they finally have an S3-compatible API I could look into rewriting that part to use a standard S3 action.
Bunny.net also lets you host scripts on the edge, kinda like Workers. But they just call it Bunny Edge Scripting. Combining this with their newly released cloud (SQLite) databases should make for a pretty good time building new apps entirely on the platform.
Full transparency: I haven’t gotten around to playing with their Magic Containers or their other services yet. For Magic Containers they currently only support Docker Hub and GitHub. And that’s not where my containers live. So support for arbitrary container registries or a built-in registry would be nice.
Oh, and did I mention their branding is all bunnies?
In the end, it’s obvious Bunny.net has some room for improvement, but the foundation is there, and it’s very stable. So if you are looking for a replacement for your CDN right now Bunny.net might just be the right choice for you.
If I convinced you to try Bunny.net for yourself I’d love if you would use my affiliate link here:
This started out being one post with multiple providers, turns out I want to yap more about every individual provider. So I’m going to make a glaze-piece for all of them :) If you have any providers you want me to try out, reach out to me on Discord @Mozoa or Bluesky