What's your experience with Gcore free CDN ?

kiosv

So I Have a VPS located in NY hosting my wordpress website and was looking for a free/cheap CDN to make my website load faster for Europe and Asian visitors,after a little search I found Gcore Labs offering free 1TB so I sign up and connected the CDN to my website and did some tests comparisons between Website+CDN+LiteSpeed Cache Vs Website+LiteSpeed Cache and surprisingly my website without the CDN perform better ! which is clearly so strange ! I'm not a techie guy (it took me a whole day to make it work ) so I'm not sure if it is my misconfiguration of the CDN or Gcore CDN being so average ? the tools I used to test the website speed :

https://pagespeed.web.dev/
https://tools.keycdn.com/performance
https://gtmetrix.com/

What have been your experience with this CDN so far and any configurations tips you can give me to make the best out of it ?

ralf

I've got no specific experience with any CDN networks, so this is just based on using haproxy and squid on my own systems.

Unless the majority of your data is static, accessed via fixed URLs and explicitly marked as cacheable in the header responses, all you're doing by using CDN is adding another layer of indirection in the request, so it would naturally be slowly.

Some things will also prevent caching in general, for instance the presence of Authorization: headers in the request.

vyas11

What's your experience with Gcore free CDN ?

It's free

Deepak_leb

is only 1TB/Month is free ?

SashkaPro

Migrated to gcore couple days ago from bunny so can't say anything about how it is in long run.

But despite their "POPs map" they still has POPs that covered Russia, on of them just 2 ms from my location so my low-traffic site works faster than with bunny (who still can't answer me about their POPs presence in RU).

Regarding G-core: CDN panel quite slow, but for one-time setup that's enough. Bunny panel has more "usability" and easy-to-go. On GC panel i googled some panel and tricks.

So just give G-core a try if 1 TB is enough.

kiosv

@Deepak_leb said:
is only 1TB/Month is free ?

Well 1TB a month is more than enough for me at the moment

@SashkaPro said:
Migrated to gcore couple days ago from bunny so can't say anything about how it is in long run.

But despite their "POPs map" they still has POPs that covered Russia, on of them just 2 ms from my location so my low-traffic site works faster than with bunny (who still can't answer me about their POPs presence in RU).

Regarding G-core: CDN panel quite slow, but for one-time setup that's enough. Bunny panel has more "usability" and easy-to-go. On GC panel i googled some panel and tricks.

So just give G-core a try if 1 TB is enough.

Yeah no complain 1TB/month is quit good for small websites.

Dazzle

Tried free GCore CDN before, same experience with you, no positive gain regarding load speed in my case, so back again with traditional WP cache, faster.

I only recommend their DNS management if someone looking for Cloudflare alternative.

Tried to use their paid plan but got rejected, I don't know why and not bother about it.

My favorite tool to check performance: speedvitals.com

vyas11

@kiosv said: Website+LiteSpeed Cache
Europe and Asian visitors

Why not use Quic CDN if you are using Litespeed? Where in Europe and Asia?

Do you serve any media files (particularly videos)? If mostly images, consider getting a cheap VPS or a NAT in EU, use it as a DIY CDN. Put everything behind CF for caching.

Edit: BunnyCDN is your best bet- most bang for the (LE) buck

Neoon

@ralf said:
I've got no specific experience with any CDN networks, so this is just based on using haproxy and squid on my own systems.

Unless the majority of your data is static, accessed via fixed URLs and explicitly marked as cacheable in the header responses, all you're doing by using CDN is adding another layer of indirection in the request, so it would naturally be slowly.

Some things will also prevent caching in general, for instance the presence of Authorization: headers in the request.

Technically a CDN makes your site slower yes, especially if the server is closer to you but the CDN routes your further away.

If the CDN has cached your static files, in most cases it makes you faster, if there is any issue with the caching or you be send to different pops or you don't have much traffic it might be slower.

Good example would be BunnyCDN, I got routed a few times to a POP in Spain, which increased the latency for most stuff by easily 3-4 times.

Was due to CF public nameservers apparently, using google nameservers gave me a different POP, which is closer yes but the routing from my ISP is worse.

A different pop, a bit further away would have lower latency than the closer one.

JeDaYoshi

@Neoon said:
Good example would be BunnyCDN, I got routed a few times to a POP in Spain, which increased the latency for most stuff by easily 3-4 times.

Was due to CF public nameservers apparently, using google nameservers gave me a different POP, which is closer yes but the routing from my ISP is worse.

I've noticed this myself - not only with bunny.net, but also with other providers which depend on GeoDNS. Looks like 1.1.1.1's caching is so aggressive that it ignores whether the origin client subnet might be different or not, which has that side-effect.

Let's put this example, for anyone that might not understand properly:

• Let's say that there's a client with a IP geolocated to Spain, to which 1.1.1.1 gets routed to a PoP in the United Kingdom.
• You are a client in the United Kingdom.
• If the Spain client queries DNS for domain.com, 1.1.1.1 sends an anonymised EDNS client subnet (basically, if your IP is 192.168.1.128, it sends 192.168.1.0, so the DNS server can provide records with PoPs closest to your location)
• However, this is cached, and shared between all clients that might reach that PoP (and well, that specific server). It's okay for static records, or otherwise anycasted IPs - but not for constantly-changing records based on the provided IP.
• the end result? If you query from the UK, you'll get the result that was given to the client located in Spain nonetheless.

bunny.net's GeoDNS gives the EDNS client IP/subnet preference over the origin request IP. You could say this can be fixed by just preferring the origin request IP, but that means you cannot select PoPs that are optimised for a specific ISP, and might cause issues in cases where, for example, you are in Miami, but your DNS server is located in Atlanta.

cchwww

It's good, but doesn't support ipv6 content origin source.

kiosv

@Dazzle said: My favorite tool to check performance: speedvitals.com

Thanks for the great tool ! I did a lot of tests with it and confirmed that the setup with their CDN is just slightly better ! almost no difference in terms of load speed which make useless in my opinion.

@vyas11 said:

@kiosv said: Website+LiteSpeed Cache
Europe and Asian visitors

Why not use Quic CDN if you are using Litespeed? Where in Europe and Asia?

Do you serve any media files (particularly videos)? If mostly images, consider getting a cheap VPS or a NAT in EU, use it as a DIY CDN. Put everything behind CF for caching.

Edit: BunnyCDN is your best bet- most bang for the (LE) buck

Thanks for the suggestion ,Quic CDN turns out to be good in terms of load speed especially for the USA and Europe locations I think I'm gonna stick with it

Ed_Chd

It used to be quick months back, but it isn't now. Don't know exactly what caused it, maybe misconfiguration?
Some people here recommended BunnyCDN, but it couldn't be used in my case, so I can't give my verdict to them. They don't support WebSocket for realtime bidirectional communication.

kiosv

@Ed_Chd said:
It used to be quick months back, but it isn't now. Don't know exactly what caused it, maybe misconfiguration?
Some people here recommended BunnyCDN, but it couldn't be used in my case, so I can't give my verdict to them. They don't support WebSocket for realtime bidirectional communication.

Actually I tested BunnyCDN as well, it is good and easy to setup I'm considering it as a my first choice for a paid CDN .