We're removing the Core tier on October 1st. Here is why. 

On April 27th 2023, just some 17 months ago, we've announced the Core network tier - a set of limited number of 10 edge points of presence at the industry lowest pay-as-you-go pricing for content delivery available on the market. And while this new and cheaper tier has been picking up traction fast, we've observed something unexpected happening. Pushr will be removing the core tier offering from our service on October 1st, 2024. Read on to find out why.

The Core network tier is our ultra low-cost CDN offer. It is suitable for bulk delivery of large content where speed and latency could be traded for an extremely low cost per GB of traffic: just $0.004/GB, which happens to be the worlds lowest. Such tradeoff makes a lot of sense when talking Video on Demand (VOD) and large file downloads, since the visitor would spend the majority of their time actually downloading the content. Latency is a non-issue provided the bandwidth is there and the visitor is being routed to a not too distant edge server. Presumably, the Core tier would help customers on the tightest budgets to still benefit from a fast, stable and scalable global service on which they could rely to build their services and products, without breaking the bank. Eventually, this would allow them to survive the early stages of their projects until they start turning in revenue, which would then allow them to enter the growth stage and, ultimately, become successful. That was the idea.

What happened?

17 months later this has not been the case. While we are very happy to see some projects that started from the ground up on the Core tier and grew relatively large in no time, they make up for no more than 10% of the Core tier usage. The rest 90% seems to be content in specific niches that simply do not seem to be bringing in benefits to it's owners, resulting in them landing on our Core tier simply because they need the cheapest possible price per GB of traffic out there. As the core tier grew, we started to focus more and more on keeping up with the demand, upgrading and adding more physical machines to the Core tier edge points, upgrading uplinks, etc. But due to the low profit margin on this tier, the rest of the network would see a slower rate of expansion and upgrades. I've always believed that one of the multiple ways to evaluate a service like Pushr is to ask the simple question "Is it helping it's customers grow and make more money?". On the Core tier, for these 90% of it's users, the answer is a clear "no".  On the other hand, by focusing on the Core tier, we are effectively starving the Standard and Extended tiers.

Now what?

As a result we've decided to remove the core tier and turn our focus to the Standard and Extended tiers. In the upcoming months we will be introducing multiple speed, reliability and functionality upgrades, improved routing, new APIs and new products, aimed to provide developers, tech founders, creators and SMEs with a plug-in web infrastructure that helps set their next project on the path to fast growth.

Core tier will be removed on October 1, 2024

CDN zones that are currently on our Core tier will remain there until October 1st, 2024. On that day they will be moved to the Standard tier automatically. If you have a CDN zone on the Core tier it will remain completely operational, without any downtime during the move. You will gradually see traffic being served from more points of presence, lowered latency and faster loading of your content, and will experience higher availability.