Cloudflare vs Bunny CDN for small UK sites

We get asked about this a lot: “Why Cloudflare? What about Bunny?” Fair question, Bunny is great, and for a handful of our sites we do use it. Here’s how we actually decide.

What Cloudflare does well

For a typical UK small-business site, Cloudflare is the obvious default because you get, in one product:

• A sensible CDN with good UK pop coverage
• A WAF (web application firewall) that’s genuinely useful, not just theatre
• DNS that’s fast and free
• DDoS protection at the edge
• SSL certificates, forever, no fuss
• Analytics that don’t require adding a tracking pixel

The free tier already covers most small sites. The paid tiers are priced per-domain, not per-request. You always know what your bill will be.

Where Bunny wins

Bunny is lighter, cheaper on egress, and faster to configure when you know what you’re doing. Their geo-routing is excellent, and their pull-zones make origin caching genuinely effortless.

We reach for Bunny when:

• A site has heavy image or video egress and Cloudflare R2 isn’t the right fit
• We want a simple edge pull-zone in front of a static origin with no WAF needed
• The client wants predictable per-GB pricing instead of a plan tier

Why we don’t mix and match on the same site

You can layer Cloudflare in front of Bunny (or vice versa). We usually don’t. Every layer is another cache to invalidate, another place a bug can hide, and another thing to explain when something breaks at 3am. One CDN is usually enough.

Our lazy default

90% of the sites we host run behind Cloudflare. It gets out of the way, bills predictably, and covers the basics brilliantly. The remaining 10% are specific cases where Bunny makes sense, usually high-media sites or when the client has existing Bunny tooling.

If you’re picking a first CDN for your own site and you don’t already have strong feelings: start with Cloudflare.