Any draw backs to using CDN?

Strange... I've not seen it here ever. And the only time I've seen it on my site is when there *was* an origin server problem (usually when I'm mucking stuff).

I guess you also have to factor in how often someone would get a page timeout on a normal site without CF. Because that would result in a CF origin server error of the page was timing out (for example if there was database locking going on because of some nasty query being run).
 
Mouth said:
Sounds like a miss configuration? If you're barely using the CDN (threads with not many pictures), then the slowness is likely to come from your source server.
Click to expand...
There is not much to configure on the server side in terms of CDN....
Plus with Litespeed and PHP 7 (+ Opcahce), unless you are a photography forum or some forum that uses lots of images in threads, CDN has little value overall if your server is somewhere at the center of the globe (e.g. Netherlands) with a good connectivity.
 
digitalpoint said:
Strange... I've not seen it here ever. And the only time I've seen it on my site is when there *was* an origin server problem (usually when I'm mucking stuff).

I guess you also have to factor in how often someone would get a page timeout on a normal site without CF. Because that would result in a CF origin server error of the page was timing out (for example if there was database locking going on because of some nasty query being run).
Click to expand...

It was when I was in Europe last year, I haven't seen one on your site in the last months since I'm in Australia.

Moshe1010 said:
There is not much to configure on the server side in terms of CDN....
Plus with Litespeed and PHP 7 (+ Opcahce), unless you are a photography forum or some forum that uses lots of images in threads, CDN has little value overall if your server is somewhere at the center of the globe (e.g. Netherlands) with a good connectivity.
Click to expand...

Believe me, If you have your server in Europe and have people connecting from Australia or New-Zealand a CDN makes a huge difference.
It's just the distance...
36 ms to my cdn from Australia (I'm in Melbourne) and 360 ms to my server in Belgium from Australia (I think that's pretty good)
 
Fred. said:
Believe me, If you have your server in Europe and have people connecting from Australia or New-Zealand a CDN makes a huge difference.
It's just the distance...
36 ms to my cdn from Australia (I'm in Melbourne) and 360 ms to my server in Belgium from Australia (I think that's pretty good)
Click to expand...
In this case I guess you're right. But Australia is kind of an extreme case. I live in California and my server is in Netherlands, so I based my observation on that. Connecting via VPN across Europe/Middle East/West Asia didn't make much of a difference.
 
Moshe1010 said:
In this case I guess you're right. But Australia is kind of an extreme case. I live in California and my server is in Netherlands, so I based my observation on that. Connecting via VPN across Europe/Middle East/West Asia didn't make much of a difference.
Click to expand...
Yeah because you still have the latency of the distance to/from the VPN. You can't get around physical distance between end users and servers if the request is ultimately going back to the origin server. You might be able to get a better route, but you can't get around the distance, so you latency can only be so fast.

When it comes down to it a dynamic site where you have users logged in is going to have the primary page views going back to the origin server for the main page views because the pages themselves aren't cacheable. But cacheable content (which is the bulk of most pages) can be delivered from data centers closer to the end user (CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.)

Let's take CloudFlare for example... they currently have 76 data centers: https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map/

Say you were in in South Africa and your browser requested a JavaScript file from one of my domains... you are going to hit the Johannesburg data center, and since the JavaScript file is cacheable, that data center is already going to have a cached copy of the JavaScript available there. Meaning there was no need for the CouldFlare data center to make a call back to the origin server in California to retrieve it.

You can tell what is cached and what is not by looking at the underlying HTTP headers:

Code: 
twin1:~ # curl -I https://x.dpstatic.com/ad.js
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: cloudflare-nginx
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2016 22:10:40 GMT
Content-Type: application/javascript
Connection: keep-alive
Set-Cookie: __cfduid=ddeacac01fff71a42caf1e197590571d51455574240; expires=Tue, 14-Feb-17 22:10:40 GMT; path=/; domain=.dpstatic.com; HttpOnly
Last-Modified: Tue, 21 Jul 2015 18:25:52 GMT
ETag: "55ae8eb0-233b"
Expires: Tue, 14 Feb 2017 22:10:40 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
CF-Cache-Status: HIT
CF-RAY: 2754581ba2832834-SJC

The "CF-Cache-Status: HIT" header means the request was cached at the data center and didn't need to go back to the origin server. "CF-RAY" tells you what data center you hit (for this test it was San Jose, California).

In the end, this saves bandwidth of not needing to serve up images/CSS/JavaScript to every user but more importantly makes your site *feel* faster even if the main page is going back to the origin server... because the static content doesn't need to make the trip back to the origin server.
 
I recommend KeyCDN. Solid service, great coverage, and the price is very fair. While MaxCDN charges a ton for things like origin shield or ssl, KeyCDN doesn't charge extra. You can also do http/2 with KeyCDN now while IIRC MaxCDN is still doing SPDY.

I haven't tried Cloudflare, though my server tech is recommending it for us to use... But like @Mouth, I seem to have an issue piping the whole site through a 3rd party (we also dumped TapaTlk last year)... There's just something about it that doesn't sit right. I like serving our users with our own webserver directly. Maybe because that's all I've been doing for the past 18 years! Lol. KeyCDN takes a load off serving avatars/js/css super-fast with http2.

Short answer: no, no drawbacks to a CDN if it's a good one ;)
 
kontrabass said:
I recommend KeyCDN. Solid service, great coverage, and the price is very fair. While MaxCDN charges a ton for things like origin shield or ssl, KeyCDN doesn't charge extra. You can also do http/2 with KeyCDN now while IIRC MaxCDN is still doing SPDY.

I haven't tried Cloudflare, though my server tech is recommending it for us to use... But like @Mouth, I seem to have an issue piping the whole site through a 3rd party (we also dumped TapaTlk last year)... There's just something about it that doesn't sit right. I like serving our users with our own webserver directly. Maybe because that's all I've been doing for the past 18 years! Lol. KeyCDN takes a load off serving avatars/js/css super-fast with http2.

Short answer: no, no drawbacks to a CDN if it's a good one ;)
Click to expand...
I agree, Also switched from MaxCDN to KeyCDN a few weeks ago. Way cheaper for me, faster free custom ssl and http/2 (y):cool:
Last week I moved the image proxy to the CDN, that took even more traffic away from my own webserver. :)
 
I was on KeyCDN... and ended up moving away from it due to issues. Every now and then (months apart)... KeyCDN would screw up the files and users would basically get shut out of the site as files wouldn't load. It had happened enough, that I switched over to cloudflares pro package.

With a now average of 14,000 users a day, I don't have issues. I had to disable their beta rocket loader, as it caused issues in page rendering using UIX and with chat for members, though having http/2 in combination with image compression and minification, cloudflare is the fastest of options I've tried to date. This keeps my server specs to a minimum in combination with an SSD array. CPU and RAM are next to nothing, as the SSD's and cloudflare pretty much do all the lifting.

Users are super happy with the end result, costs are kept fairly low... cloudflare is worth the DNS change.
 
I'm a week into Maxcdn and using around 2GB a day with no issues and site feels much faster. Cloudflare pro sounds interesting so might use that as a fallback plan.
 
In the end, I upgraded my server to a high-end SSD and have been more happy this way. No matter what CDN I used, there would always be intermittent anomalies, eventhough rare I found them frustrating.
 
I'm using KeyCDN currently. But I am not convinced yet. it does have regular issues and is slow frequently.
 
On my old vBulletin+PhotoPost site I modified it to push the media to S3 and then front-ended the media serving with Cloudfront, which worked well - except it was getting a bit expensive, so I turned it off and was serving media directly from S3 (which is slow).

Most of my sites are very localised (98% Australian audience), so I don't worry too much about distributed CDN, but my ZooChat site has a global audience, with most of the traffic coming from the UK, US and Australia - so I'm looking for a solution which will improve performance for my members.

Because the other forums I manage are targeted at Australia, I host everything out of Singapore (previously Tokyo, but the Linode datacenter there is full so I had to move), so that's not really ideal for UK or US based audiences.
 
Not all CDNs are created equal as some have more specific geographic focus than others (meaning they might not have a strong POP/edge presence for your visitors geographical location). So it's best to test and benchmark CDNs and decide. I did a benchmark for my site for Cloudflare vs my own Route53 backed geo latency based DNS cluster (with fonts offloaded to KeyCDN) for page load times at https://community.centminmod.com/posts/26946/

Cloudflare has grown in terms of POP/Edge locations and doubled their network capacity https://community.centminmod.com/threads/cloudflare-turns-6yrs-old-doubles-network-capacity.8902/ so is only getting better especially with their new Cloudflare Traffic Control and Traffic Manager https://community.centminmod.com/threads/cloudflare-traffic-control-traffic-manager.8944/ :) Cloudflare Traffic Manager is and will be a game changer for some folks who operate multiple servers clusters distributed geographically across the world with their Geo Steering and load balancing features for scaling sites. If you sign up for Cloudflare Traffic Manager/Control beta note that part of the terms is you are not allowed to divulge details of the Cloudflare API for those features nor allowed to publicly post results or info of your involvement in the beta :)

KeyCDN is my choice for traditional CDNs just because of the pricing factor and relative performance to my site's visitor locations https://community.centminmod.com/threads/forum-top-visitor-countries-for-2015.5424/ :)

Oh and key tip, look at your Google Analytics Page Speed numbers for real world visitor page load times, that is the real key to seeing if you're improving your speeds in specific geographic locations over time.

Google Analytics examples :)

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