Honest opinion: Fastly makes the experience worse

Glitch Feedback
1

I understand why we need to use Fastly when we try to add custom domains. Business, big corporation, they need to make money too… List goes on.

Only thing that frustrates me is that the simplicity of Glitch (or adding custom domains to be exact) is gone now. I would like to add my own frustrations about Fastly’s privacy (2.1, 2.2, 2.3) policy too, but lets forget that now.

Let’s get into the main topic now:

The domain limit

As you will remember, we used glitch.edgeapp.net to connect our domains to our Glitch projects. I don’t exactly remember if there was a “maximum connected domain per user account” limit. Now that we are forced to use Fastly’s CDN, seems like we can connect a maximum of 2 (two???!!!) domains.

I currently have 2 domains connected, one for my personal homepage, and the other one for a informational page that tries to explain “freedom in the internet” shouldn’t be blocked by governments.

When I tried to add a domain for my new projects page, it says:

Screenshot 2024-12-08 at 09.41.53
Screenshot 2024-12-08 at 09.41.531506×152 15.8 KB

Well, what am I supposed to do now? I don’t want to pay to a company which I don’t trust with my data, and then imagine me as a Glitch Pro user which pays $8 a month, being forced to subscribe to another company just to serve their webpage in their own domain!

You can’t trust Fastly on a free account

Fastly’s Terms of Service clearly states that they can remove your account whenever they want to, and they won’t give support if something fails.

ALL TRIAL ACCOUNTS ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TRIAL ACCOUNTS MAY BE SUSPENDED, TERMINATED, OR DISCONTINUED AT ANY TIME AND FOR ANY REASON (OR NO REASON). …

I had my full trust on Glitch. We all saw Jenn work pretty hard for the community, supporting them and keeping the spirit of a real community. Now we are absolutely seeing some corporate moves against the users even while adding custom domains.

How can the Glitch team make the experience better?

You can keep the old simplicity while using Fastly too:

Do you remember how we entered our domains, and pointed our CNAME to it?

We will return to that system, but instead of using glitch.edgeapp.net, we will use the Fastly’s t.sni.global.fastly.net address. This will be how the function kinda work:

  1. User submits the custom domain they want to use
  2. It goes through Fastly’s API, but there is a catch: Requests from Glitch projects are not limited by how many domains user registered.
  3. Once Fastly registers on their system for you, you will set your CNAME to t.sni.global.fastly.net.

And boom! The project is running, while:

  • You didn’t register or paid for another service (Completely used Glitch’s own site while registering for Fastly)
  • You weren’t forced to subscribe or pay to another service (Requests originating from Glitch users/projects are unlimited)
  • We kept it simple! (Won’t have to go technical about deploying CDN, requesting SSL certs etc.)
  • And Fastly still wins, as the projects are routed through their CDN and they collect the data they want.

If anyone from the Glitch/Fastly team would like to discuss, please do so! I am open for what you think we can improve on Glitch.

2 Likes
2

agreed in that two is weaker than unlimited and that fussing with a separate service is more effort than glitch’s simple UI.

I personally don’t get the impression that glitch or fastly decided “we want to collect more data, so take away this feature and make users do domains in this new way.”

what we’ve heard, and I suppose I find credible, was that the previous custom domain system was not sustainable.

in the previous incarnation of custom domains, glitch partnered with fly.io to receive traffic from custom domains through fly.io’s edge computing platform… roughly. we later found out that it was not fly.io’s edge computing platform proper, but rather it was a custom piece of infrastructure fly.io was running. to my knowledge we have no info on what fly.io received in return for this, but it sounds like it wasn’t enough to keep the system maintained. fly.io later complained that the system was legacy and didn’t fit well with the rest of their operations and declined to fix it when something about it broke. it fell into disrepair in March 2023 Temporary end-of-support for adding new custom domains

by then glitch was part of fastly, so I would have to guess that it was in agreement between both teams that they believed custom domains should remain as a feature in glitch. they posted that custom domain unavailability during that time was temporary.

fastly offers compatible service to transfer traffic from a custom domain to a backend server, so they started working on ways to integrate that into glitch. we’ve since seen that evolve from a private testing thread with notes in a shared doc to removing the need to email glitch staff for each domain, to starter projects that only need a fastly API key, to the official release of free tier fastly developer accounts, to tutorials and videos by Sue on how to set up custom domains.

and whatever the business reason was, their decision on what a free developer account could reasonably have was two custom domains. maybe it’ll be more sustainable than unlimited?

anyway thanks for writing up this feedback. I hope this isn’t the end of the line for how custom domain setup works. and I think we’re not alone in thinking it could be simpler

4 Likes
3

I feel like they might have just missed this limit. Fastly trial accounts always had the 2 domain limit AFAIK, and maaaybe they got a bit lazy on the implementation?

It’s a sunday so we will probably have to wait for tomorrow to see a response from the Glitch/Fastly team for now :hourglass_flowing_sand:

4

Not so much lazy as trying to focus on what’s achievable with resources being balanced across many things. We’re definitely listening to feedback on how it should ideally work, and I will say, since all of us on the team are also users of Glitch, we see the same strengths & weaknesses you do.

Definitely helps to hear you all say what you’d like to see, though! Can’t promise we’ll deliver everything as fast as we’d all like, but we can make sure we’re headed the right way.

2 Likes
5

Hey there Anil!

Thanks for the response. I would like to clarify that I’m not trying to rush anyone into releasing a new, unsustainable feature that could hurt Glitch/Fastly’s operations (we all know that that would be very stressful for the devs :face_exhaling:)

All I wanted to do is share my own opinion about this topic. I just want to make Glitch better for everyone, and that is why I like the community-spirit of this project!

1 Like
6

As someone who grew up during the “free Minecraft server hosting” phase and always had to rely on subdomains (tough childhood), I think we’re more than fortunate to get at least 2 free domains to connect, especially in this economy, considering how services similar to Glitch either offer no free domains or have them on a paid plan (or sometimes one domain — but we got two!).

1 Like