DI.FM Eliminates Egress Costs Using Backblaze and Cloudflare’s Bandwidth Alliance

Digitally Imported (DI.FM) is an online radio destination for electronic music fans around the world. Founded in 1999 with a single channel, DI.FM today offers 90+ specialized channels via the Web, mobile applications and third-party streaming partners. Through a vast catalog of 100% human-curated electronic music, DI.FM ensures a superior listening experience with authenticity, originality, and depth.

The Challenge

DI.FM sought a global delivery and performance platform they could trust to reliably serve streaming media worldwide from their colocated origin servers. Further, they wanted to achieve this without paying high rates for storage, data transfer from their origin to their content delivery platform, and final distribution to end-users (many cloud vendors impose additional fees for each step in this pipeline).

This is where the Bandwidth Alliance came in: by pairing Backblaze's affordable and reliable object storage with Cloudflare's global cloud platform, including its best-in-class CDN, DI.FM found a path to a modern and resilient media streaming solution that integrates well with their hybrid infrastructure — while achieving major cost savings.

The Bandwidth Alliance Solution

Streaming media is at the core of DI.FM’s business, and without a global cloud platform to handle distribution — their product doesn't work. They need a partner with transparent and predictable pricing and enough capacity to serve their global customer base.

As DI.FM initially evaluated potential partners, they optimized for a balance of pricing between their origin and CDN, and then again for the cost of transferring between the CDN’s points of presence to end users. Many of the vendors DI.FM evaluated billed excessive rates for these transfers, used complex bundles to extract additional tolls, and lacked the global coverage DI.FM needed.

The Bandwidth Alliance proved to be the answer. By migrating to Cloudflare, DI.FM was immediately able to deliver content from Cloudflare’s global network, spanning over 330 cities in 90 countries worldwide. Now, listeners who previously had to deal with the latency of streaming content from remote servers are seeing a vastly improved experience, with tunein latency (the delay between pressing play and audio starting in their client) improving by as much as 300ms.

In addition to using Cloudflare to stream media and distribute its web content, DI.FM also leverages Cloudflare’s robust security protection to keep DI.FM’s site and APIs safe, including obfuscating the location of its origin servers.

Meanwhile, DI.FM began using Backblaze’s B2 storage, which is active object storage similar to AWS’s S3 at a fraction of the cost. Because Backblaze and Cloudflare are both partners in the Bandwidth Alliance, they waive the egress fees that other cloud vendors typically charge — meaning that DI.FM doesn’t have to pay to move its content from Backblaze’s storage to Cloudflare’s global network.

“DI.FM is poised to scale efficiently in line with growing demand thanks to the Bandwidth Alliance: storing content on Backblaze B2 — at only a 1/4th the cost of S3 — and moving it via Cloudflare’s global delivery network with zero egress fees.” said Nilay Patel, VP Sales, Backblaze

About the Bandwidth Alliance

The data transfer fees charged by many cloud providers can be an integral part of your cloud hosting bill. Since cloud providers use their own global telecommunication backbone or use transit service providers to carry traffic, they incur infrastructure costs, which they pass on to their customers as data transfer fees.

Most cloud providers that deliver traffic to users via Cloudflare share a presence with Cloudflare in the same data centers around the world. In these data centers traffic is transferred locally through a peering connection, minimizing infrastructure costs and transit charges. Our partners have agreed to pass on these cost savings to our joint customers by waiving or reducing data transfer charges.