Imgix – Image Processing as a Service Reviewed

medium.com

10 points·nparsons08··4 comments

Was most interested in this point:

> According to KISSMetrics, every additional second of load time for a page will increase its bounce rate by 7%.

Awesome, actionable metric. However, all I can find in the linked page is this, which is a totally different metric:

> A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

These stats are usually about when the site becomes accessible, not jumping, text or the most important content loaded etc. Of course, optimizing images is important, but they load async anyway. Besides, people using imgx probably are heavy on pictures sites anyway.

Better start cutting the js and css bloat and load them both async.

I use imgix at work and love it. However, there's one more downside which the article didn't mention, is no protected or authenticated assets, Say if you only want to serve an user some image if he's logged in. Other than, it's a perfect service.

Another one is that its "master" based pricing really relies on you using it their way, as a CDN with few files read many times.

For example for the price of their $10/mo minimum service, you can get 2 droplets + 2TB bw from DigitalOcean or 2000 "master images" + 50GB bw from imgix. If you need to process each image once (maybe for a machine learning task) and it takes say 5s (pngcrush can take a while), you can process 518k images in a month on DigitalOcean vs. only 2000 on imgix. Even if you're doing a lot of processing, the fact that they require you to bundle a CDN makes it prohibitively expensive.

It'd be really nice if they dropped the CDN.

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