/ project
A small service that tries to stay unremarkable
CDNPulse has been serving open source files since March 2019. It is run by five volunteers, funded by donated capacity, and deliberately kept small enough that one person can understand all of it.
Why it exists
A published package version is an immutable artefact, but most of the ways people load one into a page are not. A bundler pins it and then the lockfile drifts; a hand-written tag points at a host that will be reorganised in two years; a tutorial links to a file that quietly changes underneath its readers.
CDNPulse takes the narrow version of that problem — give me exactly this file, from exactly this release, forever — and does only that. There is no build step, no account, no dashboard, and no roadmap towards becoming a platform.
How it is operated
- Team
- Five volunteers across four time zones. Two are on call in any given week.
- Changes
- Every change to the edge configuration is reviewed by a second operator before it ships, including during an incident.
- Drills
- A full provider drain is rehearsed on the first Tuesday of each month, in production, during business hours.
- Retention
- Aggregated counters are kept for 24 months. Nothing per-visitor is kept at all.
- Deprecations
- Announced on this page at least 180 days ahead. No URL that has ever returned 200 has been retired since launch.
The promise that matters. An exact-version URL that works today will keep working. If the project ever has to stop, the plan on file is to hand the zone and the immutable storage to a foundation that can keep answering those requests read-only, not to switch the domain off.
Funding
Almost all of the cost is capacity that four transit providers contribute in kind. The cash component covers storage, the two DNS contracts, and the origin facilities. Figures are published every quarter and cover the three months ending 30 June 2026.
| Line | In kind | Cash |
|---|---|---|
| Transit and edge capacity | € 48 900 | — |
| Immutable storage | — | € 6 400 |
| Origin facilities (three sites) | — | € 3 900 |
| DNS, two operators | — | € 1 100 |
| Certificates and monitoring | — | € 900 |
| Total, quarter | € 48 900 | € 12 300 |
Nobody is paid. There is no sponsored placement anywhere on this site and no arrangement under which a package can be promoted.
What is stored
A request produces one increment to an hourly counter keyed by path and coarse region. The client address is used to route the connection and is discarded before anything is written down. There are no cookies, no local storage, no beacons, no third-party scripts, and no identifiers of any kind.
This page, like every page here, is plain HTML and one stylesheet served from the same host. Nothing on it loads from anywhere else.
Acceptable use
- Load files into web pages, documentation, notebooks and demos, freely and without attribution.
- Do not use the service as an origin for a product you resell, and do not proxy it behind another CDN.
- Do not use it to distribute anything that is not the published content of a public package or release.
- Automated mirroring of large parts of the catalogue is not welcome; ask first and a snapshot can usually be arranged.
Removal requests. The cache is a mirror of public artefacts. If something needs to come out — a leaked credential in a published tarball, a licence problem, a legal order — write to removals@cdnpulse.org with the exact paths. Requests naming a specific immutable path are acted on within one working day; requests to remove a whole package are acknowledged in the same window and decided within five.
Contact
- Operations
- ops@cdnpulse.org — outages, routing, anything that looks like a fault.
- Removals
- removals@cdnpulse.org — see above.
- Security
- security@cdnpulse.org — acknowledged within 48 hours, disclosure window 90 days.
- Everything else
- hello@cdnpulse.org — expect a slow but real reply.
Timeline
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 2019-03 | First location, one provider, npm packages only. |
| 2020-06 | Release tags added; second DNS operator contracted. |
| 2021-02 | Third and fourth providers; monthly drain drills begin. |
| 2022-09 | Mid-tier caches introduced; origin load drops below 1 %. |
| 2023-11 | Module rewriting shipped as /+mod. |
| 2024-08 | Per-path digests published for every immutable object. |
| 2025-05 | HTTP/3 everywhere; counters rebuilt without any address retention. |
| 2026-04 | Ninety-sixth location; South American capacity doubled. |
Independence. CDNPulse is not affiliated with any package registry, repository host, foundation or package author, and does not represent them. It mirrors publicly published artefacts and nothing more. Each file remains under whatever licence its authors chose.