I recently added Cloudflare to a few sites.\u00a0 I must admit to some scepticism on the whole idea of a CDN and its ability to positively impact the performance of the website, but I gave it a go and set one up.\u00a0 The result I must say is positively astounding.\u00a0 So much so that we are now adding it to our corporate site to see what impact there is there.<\/p>\n

The Problem – slow site performance<\/h2>\n

For some time now, our corporate site has suffered some severe performance issues.\u00a0 Not just ordinary performance, we are talking a download time of around 60 seconds for just the homepage.\u00a0 Now while there are some other issues that include some coding, scripting and technical aspects which need to be addressed, there is also a further matter of the web content publishers that use the Content Management System.\u00a0 Both of these have adversely impacted the sites performance, and many times there has been a lot of blame placed upon the CMS itself from being too difficult to use, not intuitive and complicated but really it was about training.\u00a0 The practice of a more rigorous code review process also contributed to the matter, which is being addressed as well.\u00a0 Ultimately, a quick fix appeared to be the potential for a CDN to speed up the delivery of content.<\/p>\n

What is a CDN?<\/h2>\n

A Cloud Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of servers around the world that are connected and that host your content for you.\u00a0 Its a way of providing alternative sources of distributing the content to users from various alternative high speed delivery servers.\u00a0 Mostly from a server that is closer to the user which adds to the speed of delivering the content.\u00a0 The CDN will make copies of the site and the site content and when a user requests content that is part of the CDN, the network will redirec the request to communicate with the cached content.\u00a0 The process is virtually transparent to the end user except for the speed of delivery which should become noticably faster.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of CDN’s around these days, from from the very high end providers such as Akamai to the lower end ones, which have proven to be quite successful.\u00a0 In this case, at least for trials, we chose CloudFlare.com which gives a fantastic business account for just $200 per month.\u00a0 They offer some great free accounts as well for those of us who are simply blogging, but ultimately, this provided the best deal to go for some trials, get some stats and see what the difference was.<\/p>\n

Watch the Video<\/h2>\n