Comment by ljm
23 days ago
Out of curiosity, how do you become ‘exceedingly good’ at serving static HTML?
By all accounts, they’ve centralised the delivery of this static HTML at several layers of the network stack, and you’re not getting static HTML anymore because some other part of the business fucked it up.
The World Wide Web was serving static HTML for decades before Cloudflare came along. Open an FTP client, drag and drop, and boom - new HTMl is served.
When we talk static HTML I think that still includes images, stylesheets and potentially even very basic javascript (e.g. setting classes). Those take advantage of CDNs; Cloudflare have an extensive CDN with decent latency / locations. They also are a DNS registrar and a lot of people use them for their local DNS provider so again latency benefits. That's before we talk about the DDoS protection, injecting stuff like metrics etc etc. I don't want to sound like a Cloudflare rep here but I can see where this user is coming from.
The biggest advantage? Regional caches.
If your traffic volume stays well below server capacity, the network connection is impeccable and throughput isn't a major factor in ISP costs, then the improvement is indeed negligible.
However, if the server or it's network ever experience congestion or disruption, or you simply face sheer volume, that's when CDNs shine.
Regional caches insulate clients from network or performance issues with your server or its connection. If you have high volume, they also drastically reduce traffic through the backbone which can reduce ISP costs, depending on your contract.
Like others say, this really applies to all static content, including static media, css and js.
I hear you ask, "how can you be exceedingly good at this?" Caching itself isn't tricky, but catching efficiently and effectively at such huge scales is. The fact that Cloudflare offers these services for FREE, is a pretty good (perhaps Faustian) deal.
If everything is static, they'll cache it in a DC close to you. That's better than what we had before.