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I have always been the one who looks to run things at cheaper cost. I’m going at again this time, from Cloudflare Image to R2.
Story time
Why? And for what?
A customer reached out to me about an issue on Feather, his blog links when typed into Facebook composer were resulting in 404 for og image.
If you don’t know what og image is, it’s the image that shows up went you type a link in editor.
After he reached out about the issue, I checked multiple apps for this but none of them were having this kind of problem. After googling, I found that it’s just a Facebook thing.
The bug
If the og image url redirects to a different url then Facebook won’t follow. That is what was happening. We were directly entering https://www.notion.com url which was redirecting to img.notionusercontent.com domain. Facebook does not like this.
The solution
We started downloading images from notion and then uploading to our account’s cloudflare images.
In 3 days, we saved 64k images and total times images got served were 700k. We run a blogging platform so I calculated that for just 1 million saved images on Cloudflare Images and with the total Feather traffic of 70-80 million a month, I’m gonna get charged $1500+ a month 🤯
Crazy number right? When our traffic grows, our bills will increase linearly.
Realisation
After seeing that number I realised we can’t afford to pay this only for hosting and serving images in different sizes.
I turned to Claude and chatgpt after brainstorming for the solution while keeping the costs in check, we came up with R2 and as the most cheapest option.
The problem? I won’t get resized images.
That’s a big problem for a blogging platform who cares about SEO. That’s when it hit me, what is the need for images to get converted to different sizes on the fly like how Cloudflare Images gives us, I could just convert them once and save it R2 and directly serve it from there!
I setup a small nodejs server on railway and handoff all the resizing and image upload logic to it. Saving myself $1500 a month!
There are lot of ways to solve a problem, just make sure the solution fits you.
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