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CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

thenextweb.com

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Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#42
post #15
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who pays for the "accidental CDN" that, according to the article, pushes as much traffic as the 10th largest website on the internet? Their optional $20/mo subscription plan can't possibly cover that. They use VigLink to add affiliate tags to the external links of the sites that use them.

They use VigLink to add affiliate tags to the external links of the sites that use them. Some mangled affiliate links cover the cost for 10th largest traffic site nowadays?

I have a site that gets ~12 visitors/day and I make about $55/mo through that site all from the Amazon Associates program.

Referring someone through an Amazon link doesn't just credit you if they purchase that product you linked to - it credits you for any purchases they make during the cookied period. And for the whole amount of the checkout.

A couple months ago I made over $150 with that same amount of traffic because someone bought a MacBook Air (~$50 in commission), some fancy espresso maker (~$20) and a bunch of other things. Amazon has mastered the art of the upsell.

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#43
post #11

I've been using it as well and wow does it cut down on my bandwidth as well.

Just wondering, how many different lionhearted-folk are there on HN? Here's the ones I've found so far: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lionheart http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lionhearted http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=theli0nheart http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ligerhearted Any others hiding in the woodworks that wanna show themselves?

I doubt your nickname exposes your true identity any better. Some names are just more common.

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#45
I use cloudflare and I LOVE THEM. My site serves up tons of static content and thought I'd offer some specs. Previously, I had been considering moving all my static content to the rackspace CDN, but thought I'd give Cloudflare a whirl.

Since configuring with cloudflare on May 26th, I've had 26,133 page views, 368 from crawlers and 755 from bots.

Without cloudflare my average page load time is 2.66 seconds. With cloudflare my time is 1.55 (my google pagespeed score is 97/100: http://bit.ly/k3MDGk)

Out of 125,183 total requests, 72,405 have been saved by cloudflare.

10GB of bandwidth has been served since that time and 4.9 has been saved.

Cloudflare makes my site 41% faster as well.

I was getting hit with a lot of exploit attacks, mainly from China, so I was glad to see I could block by IP, IP Range and Country in their Threat control Panel. I'm aware that's not a foolproof method but it helps.

link to my site: http://www.alphavr.com/tours/properties/virtual/240

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#46
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you guys use for your reverse proxying? Custom software with very good on-the-fly HTML processing?

We use NGINX as our underlying platform, but have extensively extended it for our purposes. We actively contribute back to the NGINX open source community where there are developments we've made we think may be useful.

Sorry, but what/how exacly are you actively contributing? Other than yesterday's naive port of mod_pagespeed, I didn't find any of your contributions and you make it sound like something you're doing on the regular basis.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of your product from the very beginning, but don't say that you do things when you don't.

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#47
I saw this article and took the plunge on one of my sites. It took the standard time for the DNS to update and I was up and running shortly after. It maintains all of your MX records, etc and I did see a jump on Google Page Speed Score (went from 81-87) after installing.

One of the side benefits was their one click "apps" where you can install Google Analytics, etc and manage it from one place.

I did have one question that I didn't see a clear answer for. If I am using Amazon's Cloudfront for many of my images, how does the Pro account handle the caching of these seemingly conflicting services?

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use NGINX as our underlying platform, but have extensively extended it for our purposes. We actively contribute back to the NGINX open source community where there are developments we've made we think may be useful.

Sorry, but what/how exacly are you actively contributing? Other than yesterday's naive port of mod_pagespeed, I didn't find any of your contributions and you make it sound like something you're doing on the regular basis. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of your product from the very beginning, but don't say that you do things when you don't.

Yes, one of our engineers contributed a his work on a native port of mod_pagespeed two days ago. We have made a number of other contributions along the way as well, most of which aren't nearly as sexy as the one you pointed out. And we'll continue to do so.

Re: CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain your technology more directly? Your web site doesn't have a lot of technical detail, perhaps because people who would understand the technical details aren't your target audience. For the HN crowd, understanding what pieces are in play would help a great deal. I figure it's probably a nice cache + CDN service? I'll admit that I don't get your security claims -- it seems like entirely the wrong layer t…

Sure. At a high level: We run out of 12 data centers scattered around the world (Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Jose, Dallas, Chicago, New York, Ashburn, Paris, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt). We use Anycast (listen to the same IP out of multiple locations) as well as GeoIP DNS in order to route a request from a visitor to the website to the nearest data center. In each data center we run a reverse proxy th…

This is so helpful and interesting! I've been intrigued by yall since I saw your sign in the old SocialMedia building in PA, but figured you were just scareware because the descriptions on your web site are so fluffy.

It would be awesome if this explanation was on there under "technical details" or something.

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