CloudFlare

CloudFlare

Application and Data / Assets and Media / Content Delivery Network
Shared insights
at

In mid-2018 we made a big push for speed on the site. The site, running on PHP, was taking about 7 seconds to load. The site had already been running through CloudFlare for some time but on a shared host in Sydney (which is also where most of the customers are). We found when developing the @TuffTruck site that DigitalOcean was fast - and even though it's located overseas, we still found it 2 seconds faster for Australian users. We found that some Wordpress plugins were really slowing the TTFB - with all plugins off, Wordpress would save respond 1.5-2 seconds faster. With a on/off step through of each plugin we found 2 plugins by Ontraport (a CRM type service that some forms we populating) was the main culprit. Out it went and we built our own WP plugin to do push the data to Ontraport only when required. With the TTFB acceptable, we moved on to getting the completed page load time down. Turning on CloudFlare 's HTML/CSS/JS minifications & Rocket Loader we could get our group of test pages, including the homepage, loading [in full] in just over 2 seconds. We then moved images off to imgix and put the CSS, JS and Fonts onto a mirrored subdomain (so that cookies weren't exchanged), but this only shaved about another 0.2 seconds off. We are keeping it running for the moment, but the $10 minimum a month for imgix is hardly worth it (this would be change if new images were going up all the time and needed processing). The client is overly happy with the ~70% improvement and has already seen the site move up the ranks of Google's SERP and bring down their PPC costs. AND all the new hosting providers still come in at half the price of the previous Sydney hosting service. We have a few ideas that we are testing on our staging site and will roll these out soon.

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3 upvotes·1 comment·483.7K views
Mountain/ \Ash
Mountain/ \Ash
·
July 15th 2019 at 6:05PM

Platform Update: we’ve been using the Performance test tool provided by @KeyCDN for a long time in combination with @pingdoms similar tool and the @WebpageTest and @GoogleInsights - we decided to test out @KeyCDN for static asset hosting. The results for the endpoints were superfast - almost 200% faster than @Cloudflare in some tests and 370% faster than @imgix. So we’ve moved Washington Brown from imgix for hosting theme images, to KeyCDN for hosting all images and static assets (Font, CSS & JS). There’s a few things that we like about “Key” apart from saving $6 a month on the monthly minimum spend ($4 vs $10 for imgix). Key allow for a custom CNAME (no more advertising imgix.com in domain requests and possible SEO improvements - and easier to swap to another host down the track). Key allows JPEG/WebP image requests based on clients ‘accept’ http headers - imgix required a ?auto=format query string on each image resource request - which can break some caches. Key allows for explicitly denying cookies to be set on a zone/domain; cookies are a big strain on limited upload bandwidth so to be able to force these off is great - Cloudflare adds a cookie to every header… for “performance reasons”… but remember “if you’re getting a product something for free…”

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CTO at Uilicious·

For inboxkitten.com, an opensource disposable email service;

We migrated our serverless workload from Cloud Functions for Firebase to CloudFlare workers, taking advantage of the lower cost and faster-performing edge computing of Cloudflare network. Made possible due to our extremely low CPU and RAM overhead of our serverless functions.

If I were to summarize the limitation of Cloudflare (as oppose to firebase/gcp functions), it would be ...

  1. <5ms CPU time limit
  2. Incompatible with express.js
  3. one script limitation per domain

Limitations our workload is able to conform with (YMMV)

For hosting of static files, we migrated from Firebase to CommonsHost

More details on the trade-off in between both serverless providers is in the article

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Why we migrated opensource 😼inboxkitten (77 million serverless request) from 🔥Firebase to ☁️Cloudflare workers & 🐑CommonsHost - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻 (dev.to)
13 upvotes·507K views
Senior Product Manager at Lumin Digital·
Needs advice
on
CloudFlareCloudFlare
and
Google reCaptchaGoogle reCaptcha

We are building an Online Account Opening Application, and we already have CloudFlare. They are asking us to add Google reCaptcha, but I think that Cloudfare should be configured for this application, and we don't need Recaptcha too.

What are your thoughts?

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4 upvotes·192.6K views
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Needs advice
on
Amazon S3Amazon S3
and
CloudFlareCloudFlare

Amazon S3 or CloudFlare as a CDN? Anyone like one over the other? My devs are switching to Amazon S3 but I would like other opinions - thank you in advance! Read a little how they differ, but would love an expert opinion. Thanks!

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3 upvotes·179.8K views
Replies (1)
Technical Consultant ·
Recommends
on
Amazon S3
in

If you use another service from AWS, S3 is by far the better choice. They're way easier to integrate. One thing to consider is the cost, in some regions AWS price are more expensive than other.

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2 upvotes·3 comments·591 views
Jordan Giha
Jordan Giha
·
September 13th 2021 at 11:56PM

Hey Steven, thank you. What would this cost difference be?

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Steven Heryanto
Steven Heryanto
·
September 14th 2021 at 3:06AM

Depends on where do want to put your S3 region. You can estimate them in this page https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/S3

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Jordan Giha
Jordan Giha
·
September 15th 2021 at 1:36AM

thank you! I wish I knew what to fill out here lol

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Director Digital Engineering at Emerson Electric Co.·
Needs advice
on
CloudFlareCloudFlare
and
EdgeCastEdgeCast

Currently using EdgeCast CDN/WAF and considering a migration to CloudFlare.

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3 upvotes·173.8K views