the global CDN company Cloudflare officially launched about two weeks ago (15/03/18) the the company's 135th data center in Tel Aviv, Israel.
As of today, Cloudflare provides a CDN service to a market share of 72% of all websites in the world that use Proxy services.
For a full article on the subject – CDN – Content Delivery Network – Everything You Wanted to Know.
As of today, this is what the deployment of Cloudflare's communications network looks like, spread across 135 data centers around the world.
Will using a CDN improve your site?
If you read the article we published on 12/03/16 on CDN – everything you wanted to know, it can be concluded that using a CDN is not suitable for all types of sites.
Using a CDN will provide Several advantages such as load balancing, improved user experience, localized resilience, and improved security. The service also has several drawbacks of using caching, SEO (global IP address), and sometimes even slow site loading speeds.
This data was correct according to Cloudflare's network deployment in 2016.
Are the figures different today? We decided to run a test.
We ran a speed test on a standard WordPress site without plugins, and with the theme twentyseventeen standard theme,
We tested the site for the first time while it was hosted on uPress's shared Israeli server and then we ran the CDN service, here are the results:
On an Israeli shared server, uPress:
On an Israeli shared server, using CloudFlare:
If we look at More technical data, we can see that when we added the use of a CDN – the tool The Speedom speed test reports that our site hosted in the USA (according to the IP address), the time to first byte (TTFB) rose from 0.1s on an Israeli server to 0.6s, which is in effect the delay time that causes to a total site load of 1.4s Compared to using an Israeli server without a CDN at the time of 0.8s.
On an Israeli shared server, uPress:
On an Israeli shared server, using CloudFlare:
Summary of the test results:
If your customer base is Israeli, and your site is hosted on an Israeli server at uPress, using Israeli audience, and your site is hosted on an Israeli server at uPress, using Cloudflare's CDN service will not improve your site's speed – on the contrary,
in terms of SEO – search engines will identify that The site is hosted on a server in the USA instead of the country where it is actually hosted – Israeli.
Your site will indeed receive an additional layer of security, in terms of distribution – the visitor will receive the content in the best possible way and with maximum utilization of its bandwidth, and the hosting server's traffic usage will drop significantly.
It should be noted that the settings in the CDN service are fairly standard and without special tuning; also, the speed test was run from an Israeli test server.
Want to use the Cloudflare service – how do you do it?
If you decided to join the Cloudflare service, there are 2 ways to do so:
- The first option is create an account privately on the site Cloudflare.com, then creating the site under your account, import all the DNS records current ones (the Cloudflare interface does this automatically), point an A record to an IP address where the site is hosted.
Then go to the domain registrar (where the domain was purchased) and update the The NS addresses to the addresses suggested in your Cloudflare account, wait 24 hours at least, and the site should work together with your new CDN.This option is recommended for technical people who know how to manage DNS records independently, for sites that use a URL without www (for example: https://www.upress.co.il), and for sites that manage a large number of subdomain records.
- Second option is create a CDN zone directly from the uPress admin panel, this option is relevant only if your site uses the www prefix (or another prefix).
All you have to do is go to site management in the admin panel > under Performance tab > go to CDN settings management, and create a CDN zone. After enabling the CDN, wait about 4 hours, and the site should work together with your new CDN.
Original Hebrew uPress control panel. Follow the English instructions in this article; labels and positions may differ in the current interface.
In summary:
We welcome the entry of Cloudflare to the Israeli market and are sure there will be great demand for the product.
From a test we ran (on uPress servers) we reached the conclusion that if your customer audience is Israeli audience, using Cloudflare's CDN service will not improve your site in terms of speed, but your site will indeed get an additional layer of security, in terms of decentralization – the visitor will receive the content optimally and make maximum use of their bandwidth, and the hosting server's traffic usage will drop significantly.
in terms of SEO – search engines will identify that the site is hosted on a server in the USA instead of the country where it is actually hosted – Israeli. The decision whether or not to use the service is in your hands.
