Cloudflare CDN and Free SSL/Https: Good or Bad?
Content Delivery Networks, or CDNs are a wonderful thing. There is latency in any web request based on the physical distance the signal must travel to reach your server. A CDN caches your website at multiple locations around the world, ensuring that any request travels the least possible distance. This dramatically speeds up your website.
Cloudflare is not a CDN
My business is largely local, and in San Francisco. I also get a great deal of traffic from around the country, but also from the U.K. and Europe. But Cloudflare, cached all my site data in Singapore and no where else. Which is pretty much almost the exact other side of the world from where my content was going. So:
- If you are geographically close to Singapore and your web host is further away, you might see a speed bump
- Otherwise you will probably take a performance hit.
- Cloudflare doesn't tell you this, you figure it out for yourself
The Cloudflare Rocketloader
This aggregates all your JavaScript into one file, reducing requests. This is standard practice for website performance. You can do this with a text editor by copying and pasting. Cloudflare adds about 60k in JavaScipt to do this, for reasons unknown. I had already done this manually, so turning it on slowed my site down.
- Pros: If you are running Joomla or Wordpress and your site has the usual laundry list of scripts in the head, this will be an improvement
- Cons: This can be accomplished by plug-ins without the mysterious Cloudflare script for higher performance.
No Protection from Content Aggregators/Theives
You can't hotlink protect against specific sites. Sure, they covered the bandwidth, but I don't need my name being used to lure people into Phishing and Malware infested traps. When they rank above you for your own pictures, its gets aggravating. After leaving cloudflare, hotlink blocking those sites corrected the rankings in under 24 hours.
To be continued...
I have created custom music symbol fonts for www.jayskyler.com due to the lack of support on mobile phones and tablets. These are the flat symbol, the natural sign, the major symbol (triangle), Diminished, and half diminished symbols.
