# Why don't you use CDN ? would you if it was free ?



## NullMind (Dec 18, 2014)

While the benefits of using a CDN to speed up your website are well known for those who use it, it's still quite uncommon for the overall hosting users.

I wonder why is that!, is it that for most people it's too complicated to use ?, hard to understand or the additional cost ?

For those who don't use it, if it was given to you for free with your hosting package or VPS, would you use it ? would you take the time to edit your website to take advantage of it ?

Seems to me that the vast majority of users actually don't even know such product exists, and yes most sites might not warrant the extra cost, but if it was free ?.

Carlos


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## Licensecart (Dec 18, 2014)

I find it confusing which is why I've prepared my site ready for when I do use it but it looks hard to set up and costly for the things you have to do.


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## comXyz (Dec 18, 2014)

I use CloudFlare, but don't care about CDN feature.


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## DomainBop (Dec 18, 2014)

> Why don't you use CDN ?


CDN's inbreeding calculator confuses the hell out of me.

On a more serious note, I do use this "free" global CDN with 93 pops that one of my providers offers



> and yes most sites might not warrant the extra cost, but if it was free ?.


It would depend on the quality of the free CDN network whether it was worth it for people to use.  I've seen some sites using cheap CDN solutions that run on crappy networks and/or have overloaded CDN servers that probably do more harm than good (i.e. you sit there waiting for the images to load from the CDN network's overloaded servers).


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## Nett (Dec 18, 2014)

It adds up additional DNS lookup time and SSL connection etc. I would never bother using a CDN for small js/css/images.


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## drmike (Dec 18, 2014)

NullMind said:


> While the benefits of using a CDN to speed up your website are well known for those who use it, it's still quite uncommon for the overall hosting users.
> 
> I wonder why is that!, is it that for most people it's too complicated to use ?, hard to understand or the additional cost ?
> 
> ...


Ahhh yeah too expensive.  I am not paying another bill each month for something.

I like with MaxCDN had that flat price offer like $39 was it for 1TB and have 12 months to use it.   I like usage model like that.

Willing to pay something, but not what folks are high these days pricing things at.


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## rmlhhd (Dec 18, 2014)

With BuyVM adding Anycast to their list of features it's actually quite cheap to setup a CDN, okay BuyVM only has 3 locations but even so it's still better than giving your data to Cloudflare or some other company. At least with BuyVM or similar services where you host everything yourself you know where the data is, you know how much it's going to cost every month and you know if there's an issue all you need to do is fix it.


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## SentinelTower (Dec 18, 2014)

NullMind said:


> While the benefits of using a CDN to speed up your website are well known for those who use it, it's still quite uncommon for the overall hosting users.
> 
> I wonder why is that!, is it that for most people it's too complicated to use ?, hard to understand or the additional cost ?
> 
> ...


I think the main thing is that most users are not well aware what a CDN can do for them.

Yes, we know that the content is duplicated closer to visitors and it supposely speed things up but does it worth the extra hassle for us?

My feeling is that CDN is useful for high traffic websites or for javascript libraries widely used but at our level the visitor can download the content once and have it stay in cache without major inconvenience so why do the extra effort?


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## fixidixi (Dec 18, 2014)

Well i dont see why would a free cdn model work (storing static files for free. whats in it for you?).

My second question is that how much control do you provide over the synced content? What if i change my mind and would like to limit availability or even delete,change,overwrite some content? i havent seen any good anwsers to those questions yet:

for example if you push something to the cdn then.. its going to stay there.. forever .. while I havent had any emberrasing photos published anywhere(*yet*  ) it still feels nice that i can delete stuff at least from the source i have control over..


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## comXyz (Dec 18, 2014)

@fixidixi If it's the reason,hmm, have you ever heard about webarchive?


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## SentinelTower (Dec 18, 2014)

fixidixi said:


> Well i dont see why would a free cdn model work (storing static files for free. whats in it for you?).
> 
> My second question is that how much control do you provide over the synced content? What if i change my mind and would like to limit availability or even delete,change,overwrite some content? i havent seen any good anwsers to those questions yet:
> 
> for example if you push something to the cdn then.. its going to stay there.. forever .. while I havent had any emberrasing photos published anywhere(*yet*  ) it still feels nice that i can delete stuff at least from the source i have control over..


Why would you publish embarassing photos of yourself on your own website ?


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## wlanboy (Dec 18, 2014)

CDN as a concept is a good idea but most implementations are not as good as the concept itself.

You need a lot of POPs and a very good geo dns resolving engine. Both cost a lot of money.

Bad points in general are:


Additional DNS lookups
Additional SSL handshakes
No control of source
Last point can be a real issue if you know what Javascript is able to do (and able to reload).

I once splitted my dynamic and static content to two different vps of the same provider. Same location but different nodes.

But I was disapointed about the boost of the loading time.

All the handshakes eat up most of the benefits of the simultaneous connections.

Optimizing the cache headers for all the static content helped a lot.

But I still use a second vps for the big files to ensure that these downloads to not affect the page loading time.


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## fixidixi (Dec 18, 2014)

@

Yeah I do but I was talkin about the situation when the post is protected (by password for example) and the content is sitting on the cdn

By default there *should* be relatively small chance of getting content indexed which has no public links towards however I've seen google robots knocking on dev instance right after a final check from chrome browser ...

@SentinelTower

I tought its a tipical example of problems with cloud: control over the synced content..


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## mojeda (Dec 18, 2014)

rmlhhd said:


> With BuyVM adding Anycast to their list of features it's actually quite cheap to setup a CDN, okay BuyVM only has 3 locations but even so it's still better than giving your data to Cloudflare or some other company. At least with BuyVM or similar services where you host everything yourself you know where the data is, you know how much it's going to cost every month and you know if there's an issue all you need to do is fix it.


This is true, however you still do need to make sure all servers are synced properly. Anycast doesn't do that for you, you'd need to find a separate system that works best for you.


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## rmlhhd (Dec 18, 2014)

mojeda said:


> This is true, however you still do need to make sure all servers are synced properly. Anycast doesn't do that for you, you'd need to find a separate system that works best for you.


I understand that, rsync is good enough for syncing large files and GIT is good for websites.


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## hzr (Dec 18, 2014)

I use CDN all the time. It's just too expensive for personal use.

- CDN for Gaming community (TF2): I used to use a CDN for sv_downloadurl, but one of the latest attacks is to drain GB-funds by people that aimbot/cheat and then get banned is to continually pull map assets until you run out of bandwidth or money

- MaxCDN: is now crap

- Cheaper CDNs: Onapp CDN is nearly unusable as it doesn't support anything more than hostname, I need to be able to point things to folders, alias folders to other folders and virtualhosts, because some services expect strict paths that can't change. The only option onapp offers is to "enter your domain to cdn", which is terrible, because even for something like wordpress, I end up with duplicate content issues, I want to do something like 'cdn.example.com -> example.com/wp-content' etc.

- Cloudflare is bad if you actually want a CDN-CDN instead of just dropping your site behind it, it's not possible to have a cookieless domain OR subdomain in any way


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## sv01 (Dec 18, 2014)

Most of CDN make my website slower since not many cdn provider has pop in Indonesia. (most of my visitor coming from Indonesia).


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## dcdan (Dec 18, 2014)

CDN only adds an additional point of possible failure = it decreases overall availability of a website.

Want to speed up graphics/css/js? Set up proper caching headers. Caching will give better results than any CDN (cached stuff "loads" instantly).

CDN is great when you want to distribute media files/stream (youtube/twitch/etc), other than that... meh...


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