

We can define how long a particular file or URL should be cached for using a set of rules, so that rarely changing content (like asset files) can stay cached as long as possible, while content that changes every day (e.g.

Then, the next time someone in London downloads the same file, Cloudflare has cached it and serves it to them directly, without needing to bother our origin server.

What does that mean? When someone in London downloads a file for example, the file is fetched from our origin server (more on that later) but routed through one of Cloudflare’s nearby edge nodes. Sure, we could live without them, but it’d be a lot more work.Ĭloudflare, for us, is primarily a massive caching layer. This web giant is probably the reason we can do what we do so easily and so affordably. So how the heck do we manage to run a website with 5 million pageviews and 80 terabytes of traffic every month for under $400? Cloudflare All the Way This obviously leaves zero budget for actually creating assets, nevermind all our other costs. Serving 80TB of bandwidth from S3 is estimated to cost around $4,000 per month alone, which is coincidentally about the same amount that is being donated to us on Patreon currently. It’s easy to throw a bunch of files on Amazon S3 and call it a day, but you’re gonna rack up a bunch of bills that you simply cannot afford to pay. Running a massively popular website and asset resource while being funded primarily by donations has always been a core challenge of Poly Haven. Note: All stats and figures below are true only at the time of writing, and will certainly change over time.
