After an outage seven days ago, unpkgd.com, a widely used CDN for NPM packages, is again down.
This time, the outage is more severe. At the time of writing, unpkgd.com has been down for hours. Even the official status page is down.
With two outages in such a short period, I am starting to doubt whether I will continue to use unpkgd in the long term. It’s a free service, so I can’t complain really. But, it does highlight the fragility of relying on free services.
The benefit of using a popular CDN is, if someone else has already cached the script you’re using from the same CDN, it loads faster on your site because the visitor already has it.
Setting up your own CDN is a trivial thing to do. You lose the benefit of global caching through a popular shared domain, but you are in control when things go wrong.
Global caching through a CDN is no longer a thing: https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/say-goodbye-to-resource-caching-across-sites-and-domains/
So the only benefit of a CDN is close to the edge hosting, but depending on your demographic you can easily achieve that yourself.