New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
But the strange thing is, if Asian bandwidth is expensive, they would route outside of that region right? I just tried my VPN's HK location, it routed it to Taiwan. If they wanted to cut bandwidth costs, I'd imagine it would go to one of their PoPs in the US. I don't suppose Taiwanese bandwidth is cheaper than Hong Kong bandwidth, would it be?
Even in my city here in Canada, it's routing it south into the states, even when they most likely peer with my ISP at the local IX in my city.
Their DNS works great everywhere though.
If you meant a CDN, you can checkout BunnyCDN (aff link) - one of the cheapest CDN out there and pretty good performance wordwide. @BunnySpeed is here if you need more info, though they do offer a free trial which let you see if it works fine for your use case or not. Full page caching possible, several POPs all around the world. Fast DNS resolution for your CDN cname if you use them on a dedicated cookie free (sub)domain for your statics assets only.
My blog is hosted in Atlanta, gets routed to UK CF London datacenter for most Asian visitors. Sometimes they get Singapore location but 95% of time its London!
Your advice is to continue using them but disable the proxy?
I've tried using BunnyCDN and it's working well.
Pro plan doesn't give you access to more PoPs, this is based on people's experience on LET and Cloudflare Community, I personally haven't tried Pro plan, but I do use Business plan.
You can either subscribe to Business plan or Argo if you want access to more PoPs.
I would keep using them for DNS and disable the "proxy" for your pages and add a subdomain to BunnyCDN for your static assets. You can try this and see if the performance if better that way and then, looking at the results you can decide what to do next. Keeping the proxy for the pages and using the Bunny (or another similar CDN with more POPs than CF Free) for the static assets is doable as well. It depends where your server is located and where your visitors are. if your server's provider gives you nice bandwidth (fast routes all over the world) it should be more than fine to send your visitors directly there, without the extra CF hop for the pages, and to use a CDN for static assets only. If you do use full page caching on CF edge nodes, it's no big deal if your traffic is traveling a bit more to reach CF as long as the route is still shorter than what it would be without CF reverse proxy. You can also enable full page caching with BunnyCDN, that way your pages will always be served from pretty close to your visitors. Not needed in most scenario, just look at how most global sites are doing: hosting the pages in US or EU and using a CDN for static stuff...
With Anycast it's BGP shortest route ideally in the general case. Most ISPs apply some degree of Traffic Engineering (be it via BGP communities on the route source side or static routes on the receiving side) to optimize bad routes. But more often it's lowest ($$$) cost, expecially when high price bandwidth is involved.
The reason I used CF is their proxy so I can hide my web server IP.
But now I'm using Nginx Proxy Manager to reverse proxy my web server. Not only that, it also make managing Nginx stream, redirection, access list, Let's Encrypt, much easier and fun. Go try it!
Thanks for the advice. That's exactly what I'm doing right now and I feel like it's a bit faster.
My server is located in Singapore and most of my audience is from the PH. When I'm with Cloudflare, I found out it serves me from Japan which could be the reason for the delay.
After I turned off proxy, I think my response time has improved.
Here's the screenshot of my updown.io account. Do you think I can still improve it?
https://imgur.com/a/1wLfxdS
Does it support "cache everything" like cloudflare ?
I turned off the proxy when I switched my DNS to Cloudflare because images were loading really slowly for Lychee (https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee). And the zip download was broken by Cloudflare's proxy as well. I guess some headers were getting changed or something?
If you want to focus on PH, you probably don't even need to use a CDN for your static assets, as your server ain't that far. A CDN would be good if you had say traffic from PH but also BR/US/EU for example.
I'm not used to updown.io, I'd recommend webpagetest.org or gtmetrix.com to check out loading time from various places in the world. But again, if your traffic is from PH and you get good results there, no need to bother that much with loading time from elsewhere!
It’s interesting they’re secretly doing it without announcing it to it’s customers.
I tried my VPN’s Turkey server. Tried my site (free plan), served from London, UK. Tried Cloudflare, served from Istanbul, Turkey.
They really are prioritizing paying customers to cut bandwidth costs... Has anyone tried from an African IP address? Didn’t it say that all their traffic is peered in Africa and that it costs completely nothing?
Are you using the Pro or Business paid plan?
I said my own site was the free plan.... Cloudflare served their own site from within the country. It says so within my post!
Tbh I don't know, didn't bother to check the nginx config. As seen on screenshot, there is "Cache Assets" though.
You have point. It's actually working well now with BunnyCDN but I will still experiment in the next few days. Majority is PH but I still get like 30k+ from other countries.
How about DDOS? Should I be concerned about that now that I'm no longer proxied by Cloudflare?
I'm actually thinking of getting Cloudflare Pro (for MNL) but I noticed that even Pro users don't get the MNL location. One site I know is still being served from SG.
Probably worth it for those visitors to keep BunnyCDN, if they are all around the world. Even more so for people in America or Africa. Connectivity to SG is pretty good in EU, Oceania and latency is OK.
For DDOS keep in mind that not all websites are DDOS magnets! Does your provider offer some kind of DDOS protection? Might be enough for your needs.
SG pop should be fine in PH. Where is the location of your server? I suggest putting your server to SG.
Cloudflare will only serve your site via US or EU on free plan as those are the locations they have bandwidth alliance. The other countries have bandwidth cost.
If you want fast performance then disable the proxy (cloud feature) or use bunnycdn. If you want anti-ddos then use cloudflare and enable proxy. The reason why it is slower when proxy is enable because it goes through a lot of checks and process before reaching tour site.
If your site does not attract ddos then bunnycdn should be fine. If it attracts ddos then i suggest staying with cloudflare.
Ping to cloudflare IP from Indonesia
it makes my websites unbearably slow.
at this rate might as well put nginx proxy in front of the cloudflare.
Or you might rather forget CF! CF Free ain't a magical solution for everyone. It works great for US/EU (where you don't need something like that if you're hosted in US or EU) but for Asia it's better IMO to host locally (SG is fine in most cases) and use CF for DNS only or not at all.
Unfortunately, it is on my case. I host mostly static content. Their "cache everything" is not something that I can find on another provider.
this is only 1 website. I have about 150 more like this. And it's not even a busy month. In busy month, 1 website can bring over 1 TB worth of bandwidth per day for 1 week.
That amount of burst visitor (I believe people called it reddit effect) can bring down my websites. Even when it's being cached on nginx.
To Be Clear, I am not talking specifically about my website, I mean every website behind cloudflare is served FROM HKG. I mean WTF, I am on Indonesia, Why cloudflare serve me from their HKG Location. Instead of Jakarta (CGK)
Serve it with nginx with a provider with enough bandwidth allocation? US West Coast should be good enough if you serve static files: increased latency but as you don't need time to generate the page it's no big deal, and there are lots of good and cheap hosts with enough bandwidth there. Or if you want to use CF, have your server close to them (i.e US if that's from where they serve most of your users).
My server is on the U.S. it's just for some reason they serve Indonesian visitor through Hongkong, instead of Jakarta.
They serve it from where it's the cheapest if you use the free plan, otherwise there would be no incentive to upgrade to a paid plan, isn't it? Anyway data travel quite fast on fiber lines, imho if you serve static files HK should be fine, the US as well...
Is there any difference with PRO plan?
Apply Page rules to cache pages at CF Edge Servers. I can confirm this on free plan. Served website from my origin country. Super fast!
Cloudflare addresses the peering and routing costs at https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/ so higher paid plans get higher priority for routing to data centers which have higher bandwidth costs. These include Australia, Indonesian and Indian bandwidth costs being one of the highest so on free plans can get routed to Singapore or Los Angeles.
From my experience with Cloudflare my sites on free, pro, business and enterprise plans to optimise for origins:
It's not about speed. It's about the stability. I am fine with 200 - 300 latency. But the timeout that bothers me. timeout means you will be disconnected while downloading asset. It impacts website load significantly. 30 seconds could begone 300 seconds.