Quel CDN utilisez-vous pour l'Afrique francophone ?

Now THAT is old school. I respect it. I also know exactly how that conversation went because I've had twenty of them. "Sure you can put a box here, just sign this liability waiver written on a napkin and bring the site manager lunch every Tuesday."

The barter economy of African telecom never made it into any Gartner report I've read.

Still. For the actual question I asked: I checked Hetzner's claim. Their routing from Falkenstein goes through Cogent to Marseille, then SEACOM to Mombasa, then... back to Europe? I ran traceroute from a Hetzner VM. 180ms to Dakar. That's not optimized, that's geography with a marketing sticker.

Vultr at least has Johannesburg now. Not francophone, not close, but it's on the continent. I spun up a test instance. 95ms to Abidjan, 140ms to Dakar, 160ms to Douala. Better than my Falkenstein origin. Not good. Better.

JOHANNESBURG?!? When did THAT happen?? I have $100 credit from that Black Friday deal I need to BURN

Also @annexbi the barter thing is INCREDIBLE but I don't know anyone in Abidjan who owes me favors (or food (sadly)). My network is mostly Miami crypto bros and they think CDN means "centralized degenerate network" or something

@pavel_train your cron job is giving me anxiety. 3 failed files? You just... leave them? What if it's the CSS? What if it's the CSS and someone sees your site BROKEN? I would not sleep. I do not sleep anyway but I would sleep LESS

| css missing | grep panic | /dev/null
| 0 results | calm maintained | zen of broken styles

| @haroldgsm | hetzner falkenstein | tracepath -n | awk '/seacom/ {print "confirmed"}'
| marketing != routing | truth in pipes | not in promises

| vultr jnb | mtr -r | tail -5
| avg 94.2 | min 89.1 | max 103.7 | stddev 4.1

| my pi | 240v | no ups | grep "power outage" /var/log/uptime.log
| 2 events | 6 hours total | cron resumed | world kept turning

| better solution? | maybe none | maybe accept | latency is life

Hetzner's Africa routing appears to mean "we have a landing page with a map that includes Africa." This is not optimization. This is cartography.

I reran measurements from my own vantage:

• Hetzner HEL to DKR: 1.78 × 10² ms
• Vultr JNB to DKR: 1.38 × 10² ms
• AWS CloudFront CDG to DKR: 1.21 × 10² ms
• BunnyCDN (no African PoP) FRA to DKR: 1.65 × 10² ms

CloudFront has an edge in... wait for it... Johannesburg. And Cape Town. The pattern is clear. The continent has one hub and everyone pretends that's sufficient for "Africa coverage."

RFC 1149[1] would deliver packets faster than some of these routes.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149

Manchester calling. I spent six months trying to get decent performance to Lagos for a fintech client. We ended up with a hybrid that makes engineers cry but finance loves:

Origin in London (client already had tenancy there). CloudFront for static. For dynamic, we rented a dedicated box in... Johannesburg. Not Lagos. Johannesburg. Then paid a local Nigerian ISP for last-mile optimization from their peering point in Lagos.

The "African CDN" was a London server, a Johannesburg server, and a handshake deal. Total monthly: more than the CloudFront bill. Latency to Lagos: 80ms. Worth it? Client said yes. I said "never again." Client is now asking about Kenya.

I quoted them triple. They said "sounds reasonable." I am in the wrong business.

This is why I self-host. Not because it's better. Because at least when it fails I know exactly whose fault it is. Mine.

You people renting vapor and handshake peering from ISPs you've never met... you're not solving infrastructure. You're building Rube Goldberg machines with SLAs written in invisible ink.

My Reykjavik basement has better uptime than most of these arrangements. Cold air is free. Geothermal power is 0.04 EUR/kWh. I have a /24 and a personality disorder.

If I needed to serve Africa I'd fly there with a server in checked luggage. At least I'd know where it landed.

This is what I don't get. Everyone's hunting for the magic CDN, the low price, the "edge" in every country. But nobody mentions the actual local providers.

In Amsterdam I use Leaseweb for dedicateds. They don't have PoP in Africa (I know, I checked (Frankfurt, London, nothing closer)). But I know people who work with real African CDNs, local ones, not the big names. Why isn't that talked about here?

Or does this forum only know Vultr, Hetzner and Pavel's Raspberry Pi? No wonder prices suck if you only look at Europe and pretend that's "optimized."

My cat has more common sense. And sleeps 18 hours.

Name three. I'm not being sarcastic. I genuinely want names. Every time I ask this question in any forum, someone says "use local providers" and then goes silent when pressed for specifics.

I've been in hosting twenty years. I know Orange CDN exists because Orange is Orange. I know of MTN doing enterprise CDN in South Africa. Beyond that? It's either multinational footprint with Johannesburg-only, or it's a guy with a server in a closet who doesn't have a website in English.

The gap between "local providers exist" and "local providers you can actually contract with as a foreign small business" is where most of us live. If you've got names, share them. If not, we're back to Vultr Johannesburg — https://www.vultr.com — and hoping.

And yes, my cat also sleeps 18 hours. He's not solved my latency problem either.