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Comment by compumike | Hacker News Reader

> Most of remotejobs.org is already hosted on a VPS and so in my case I'll move the web pieces there with a CDN like Cloudflare in front of it.

You probably don’t even need a CDN at all.

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Remote Jobs seems to be a content driven site. Why wouldn't it want all that content on the edge?

Why would it?

Speed? Primary reason for CDNs.

I don't buy that, at least not in the general case. A CDN adds an additional indirection between the site you serve and the content that you reference on the CDN.

Having someone handle multiple points of presence is a nice courtesy to users. Not sweating about outages is worth a lot. Someone else handling botnets & DDoS is fantastic.

I very very much believe in some DIY & doing things ourselves but I also recognize a ton of value in using CDNs. Glad both are options. DIY is hard.

A cdn is largely a value prop to reduce latency for static web pages, so that someone coming from a link get a page load asap. Once you have a dynamic or hybrid app, the value diminishes rather quickly, I assume. Potentially it could become negative if you have different points of failures and cache inconsistencies.

> Potentially

Unless CloudFlare cables are somehow shinier than the rest of the internet’s, adding one hop almost certainly adds latency. More hops more time.

In some instances where the original server was closer than CF’s edge, I measured increased time even for cached content, effectively making CF slower for every request by that specific user.

You're not factoring in the DDoS protection, that's why the answer you got is so clear. It _may_ still be value negative, but it probably depends on the tradeoffs one cares about.

If the site is both static and busy enough, then the majority of users never need to do a roundtrip to the original server.

If the site isn’t busy enough… well, I think more CDNs ought to support pre-caching. Supposedly Vercel does?

You can warm up the cache with cloudflare R2 or Bunnycdn edge storage.

> Unless CloudFlare cables are somehow shinier than the rest of the internet’s

Unrelated, but these mega actors sometimes have such shiny cables, because they can route on their internal network across the globe. Iirc Cloudflare does that for some/all traffic(?). But you’re right, all else equal more hops = worse, and I’d be unsurprised if Cloudflare overstates the benefits of using them.

> Unless CloudFlare cables are somehow shinier than the rest of the internet’s, adding one hop almost certainly adds latency. More hops more time.

In my experience, CloudFlare (and other CDNs) can often provide a better route then a regular ISP. Sometimes downloading speed is really slow, switching to CloudFlare wrap (VPN) can at least double or triple the speed.

I assume that’s because a VPN doesn’t let the ISP do any traffic shaping, which isn’t the case for regular CDNs (unless the ISP itself “positively traffic shapes” for)

Warp also regularly lets me escape public Wi-Fi’s where in-browser uploads fail.

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