BunnyCDN

What is it?

BunnyCDN is a CDN provider (Content Delivery Network). CDNs are used by most websites to make serving static content, such as images or videos, faster than delivering them directly from a webserver.

A CDN has many servers across the world that cache a local copy of a file we store, and when a user requests a webpage that needs that file, it's served from the server closest to them instead of from our webservers.

Why did we choose it?

Primarily price. For a website hosting large assets, like big artwork files or videos, bandwidth costs can become huge very quickly. BunnyCDN is a lot cheaper than some other CDNs (Amazon CloudFront, in particular, is very expensive).

In return for the low price, BunnyCDN has fairly limited features compared to more 'powerful' CDNs like CloudFront that have huge amounts of configuration options.

What do we use it for?

We use BunnyCDN to serve image files, video files, and other 'static content'. Static content means content that doesn't have to be evaluated by the server before being sent to a user; for example, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files and so forth. Meanwhile, a backend PHP file has to run on the server, and thus is 'dynamic content' CDNs are not suited to.

Specifically, we only use BunnyCDN's basic CDN offering. We don't use their "Bunny Optimizer" (which automates image compression and resizing, and compresses CSS/JS files), and we don't use Bunny AI either, because we have no use for it and because theft sucks.