Using a CDN to increase website speed

D Revolution has hosted it’s own website with CMS, DAM, GTD and HelpDesk for 2 years now off a single ADSL connection – first with TPG and now with iiNet.
Advantages are total control and really fast website updates.
Downside are the speed of ADSL uploads and limited threat control – you don’t have team of people looking at routers, firewalls, logs etc…

As a test, I signed up for Cloudflare on Friday night.
They are a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which also has threat control built in.
The process was easy (much easier than utilising either Google or Amazon as a CDN on the cheap) – sign up, let Cloudflare copy my DNS setting then change my NS records to point to CloudFlare.

Now when you visit drevolution.com.au, the static content has already been cached and minified (redundant data from javascript/CSS and HTML removed).
The website loads off one of the closest Cloudflare web servers by using GeoIP information.
A downside of this approach is the closest CloudFlare point of presence in in Singapore.

Whilst it messes with the logs on my web server as most of the access requests are from Cloudflare – web surfers, it does not affect my Google Analytics or GoSquared LiveStats reporting.

So far, website speeds have at least increased 300% and I started block threats from China and Russia easily from the control panel.
If your website is hosted with an ISP or hosting company – you WILL NOT get the same speed increase.
Reason is simple, bandwidth to my site was 1600Kb upstream (ADSL2 using to Annex M) – way lower than the cheapest hosting plan.

Being only 4 days in, it is too early to call this a total success or to even recommend the service, but it is off to a good start.
Add a comment and let us know what you think of the speeds…