I Built My Own Cdn with Varnish and Nginx
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
polso.infoTechstory
calmpositive
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CdnVarnishNginxCaching
Key topics
Cdn
Varnish
Nginx
Caching
The author built their own CDN using Varnish and Nginx, sparking discussion on the effectiveness of caching and the potential benefits of Anycast.
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4-6h
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- 01Story posted
Sep 11, 2025 at 7:11 AM EDT
4 months ago
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Sep 11, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT
5h after posting
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2 comments in 4-6h
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Sep 12, 2025 at 2:37 AM EDT
4 months ago
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ID: 45210180Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 8:47:02 PM
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If I could have my own anycast ip to share on all my servers, that'd be really cool.
I ran dozens of sites, some with significant traffic, off of 3 servers for years: a DB server, a web app server, and a server running Nginx and Varnish. All in a single data center.
Tuning the cache was a way better use of my time than trying to place copies in data centers overseas. A site has to be pretty darn fast to see a significant improvement from geographic dispersal alone. Most of the value people get from Cloudflare or Fastly is the caching, not geography.
But the downside of DIY is you have to do it yourself, including Linux sysadmin. Which is one reason we don’t do it that way anymore.