Hello,
Following our 2014 cloudflare test which revealed already that a CDN are useless :
https://support.yoorshop.hosting/knowledgebase/4/is-my-website-visible-anywhere-whenever-and-what-is-cloudflare.html
We decided to renew our tests with other more up-to-date CDNs including the http2/brotli, SSD, and especially the SSL at CDN level with no additional cost or complication.
Our site yoorshop.hosting already has the http2/brotli, SSD 100%, and our server is in France.
Tested :
https://www.keycdn.com
https://cdnsun.com
https://www.cdn77.com
We will not talk about rates that are quite low overall but not necessarily (at best: Formula pay as you go with a minimum of $ 49 valid for 1 year), because the first thing you want to know is : is there a real gain ?
We have successively tested these renowned providers in pull mode with the resources images and videos only, and idem in push mode (we loaded the resources on their servers directly), and the result is surprising in our case :
- we see only a gain of 5-7 seconds in term of loading speed from USA, Asia even with Australia where we get a 7 seconds 1st loading homepage (content displays far earlier than that, the rest regards loading some pics....)
we used this site for testing : https://tools.pingdom.com, but our owned international VPN network...
- Our site loads better without CDN by 25% on average
- We have discovered that most providers are just resellers, and their providers are: https://onapp.com
Conclusions :
CDN has evolved with http2, SSL, and SSD but this is unsufficient :
1. The CDN may be valid for sites with very high audience (we mean very very high), and where the limits of the server's original hardware would be reached or when the origin server is very poor in performance ... which is not he case of YOORshop's servers in général...
2. We encountered a particular hostility of the support services when we told them of our disappointment and the will to know how to obtain a gain. No argument, no answers !
3. If we want a certain gain, we will do like the very large sites with very high audience, ie they do not even use CDN, they create their own cluster with replication in real time on at least 3 distant continents ... which solves the problem of distance, and load distribution, and costs much less in the end.
4. As for the other advantages of CDN : Dos, bot filters, SLA 100%, they are useless because a good web host already has all these advantages/protections at a much more advanced level...
5. - It is also certain that first loading page is always longer and that is normal, and when visitor browse other pages, it goes far much faster since he already has about 60% of site content in his browser cache, which makes his browsing experience very good with average of 1-2 seconds even from far Australia where we had an initial 7 seconds for first page... !)
6 - Have a good host is definitely the best solution (without intermediary) with http2/SSD. Brotli compression is truly optional/useless, and gzip is still the player : it takes 3-10 ms to compress a resource, and brotli then make a max gain of 3 sec : this is unnoticeable to they eye of anyone. Also, brotli work only on SSL connections !
For those who have a not really performant host, yes a CDN may help
Saturday, November 12, 2016
