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Comment by dktalks | Hacker News Reader

What benefits are you getting from this? I mean have you built an entire CDN to cache the fonts so that your server does not have to download it every time a new page is loaded? I understand self-hosting for your own servers, but for a website this is overkill.

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Not the author, but last time I checked (3y ago), the fonts CDN was surprisingly slow, like hundreds of milliseconds of latency.

As the website I was optimizing was selfhosted, also selfhosting the font had a noticeable effect on the page load time. See https://github.com/SmilyOrg/photofield/commit/12352667c01624...

I'm not sure what you mean with the rest of the comment though, it's a very small change and it gets cached by the browser like other static assets, so I'm not sure what is the overkill here.

Hotlinking Google Fonts leaks your visitors' IP addresses to Google. This bothers some people.

It’s more than just “bothers people”. Some jurisdictions consider this to be leaking PII without consent and will issue fines if you don’t self-host or ask permission. For example:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/website_fine_google_f...

Google Fonts has an open issue that is three years old here, with no response from Google:

https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/5537

Also:

https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/1495

From the official Google note:

> Also, please note that Google LLC is certified under both the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield frameworks and our certifications can be viewed on the Privacy Shield list.

It’s very important to be aware that the Privacy Shield was declared invalid by the European Court of Justice in 2020, so that note from April 17, 2018 is worthless.

For me the biggest benefit is that my customer doesn't have to whitelist a google endpoint to use our website. Secondary benefit is being in control of downtime and/or updates (though the secondary benefit on it's own is nowhere near enough to justify self-hosting to me, but for some people it might be)

In cases where this matters, you are already using a CDN for your site, like Cloudflare. Advantage is better speed for page visitors.

I have Cloudflare and I have the TTL set to 10 years

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