Cloudflare

Everybody is aware that WordPress is a heavy truck to display some “mostly” static content. Each Plugin or Widget that is added ads some stylesheet calls, javascript calls and database requests. This all together slows up the loading time of your blog. And it gets even worse when the site become popular and has to deal with thousands of requests. Why request for each visitor something from the database when the content only changes once in a while? Why go through all the PHP logic when the final rendered HTML is always the same?

While writing about Cloudfront, I came accross another CDN service called Cloudflare. The free entry price made me suspicious, hosting and transport has a price. Since I had nothing to loose and that this domain was new, I decided to give it a try. So far, didn’t find any dirty trick. What is Cloudflare? CDN is one of the features, but in fact, they do more than just delivery. Content Delivery Network They place themselves in the CDN category. They are not a CDN in the strict sens of the term. You are not able to push files to Cloudflare and let them serve it. They are acting as a proxy in front of your site, same way Varnish would do it. But instead of having only one proxy server, they have them spread over the world, assuring that each user always get the content from the nearest one, and therefore reducing latency and speeding up the page serving.