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Is this an ad for Netlify ? It's cited 10 times in the post. There are plenty of reasons not to use a CDN, not the least being that you might not want to give

by ajnin 8y ago

Is this an ad for Netlify ? It's cited 10 times in the post. There are plenty of reasons not to use a CDN, not the least being that you might not want to give a third-party access to your traffic. Even static information might be sensitive, accessing some forbidden data can put people at risk. The central position CDN are increasingly taking on the Internet make then worryingly nice targets for snooping by surveillance bodies.

saas_co_de 8y ago
There is also very little benefit to putting pages on a CDN. CDNs are beneficial for images and static asset files because pages often have dozens of those so the small speed up of going through a CDN is multiplied many times over. The difference yielded by moving a single file (the primary page) to CDN is unlikely to make any measurable benefit overall unless you specifically run a site with a very geographically distributed user base. Even for sites with a NA/European user base you can host in either US or Europe and it makes no difference. The latency is not significant compared to other performance issues.
- staplers 8y ago
  Block 3rd party scripts by default and its amazing how many pages will simply not load at all. CDNs will eventually exert their power if this practice keeps growing. I imagine data mining for CDNs is very lucrative given they interface customer AND business.
  - kingsleyokei 8y ago
    Since you use the phrase "by default" when you say they block 3rd party scripts, I'm assuming you are aware that the weakness can be overcome by simply turning-off that feature from withing the CDN Provider's Web Interface. At least I know Cloudflare allows that.
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - staplers 8y ago
      they block 3rd party scripts "They" who? I am blocking 3rd party scripts with uBlock..
- gamegod 8y ago
  And HTTP/2 further reduces the benefit of a CDN for small assets (vs. no CDN), since requests are asynchronous and multiplexed, giving you better performance.
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- dxhdr 8y ago
  > There is also very little benefit to putting pages on a CDN. Well, you can often pay much less for bandwidth than alternate solutions.
kbuchanan 8y ago
Agreed. While they're not fully static, our websites are used in tens of thousands of schools nationwide. A CDN (no matter the provider) was getting blocked by some district somewhere for some reason or another (dedicated IP or not). This created all sorts of failover overhead for us. In the end, we bagged the CDN (for the main services, at least).
deleted 8y ago
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_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
While I certainly agree that there are lots of reasons not to use a CDN, Netlify is pretty cool and useful for certain purposes. I've started using them for a 'static' blog via Hugo and someone (not me) figured out a clever way of having comments powered by Webmentions which relies on Netlify's API to trigger rebuilds (it's nice because it results in the ability to have a Javascript-free site without paying money for some comment-service or having to have my own server to host comments on; it can be done just with a free Gitlab/Github account).

by ajnin 8y ago

saas_co_de 8y ago

There is also very little benefit to putting pages on a CDN. CDNs are beneficial for images and static asset files because pages often have dozens of those so the small speed up of going through a CDN is multiplied many times over. The difference yielded by moving a single file (the primary page) to CDN is unlikely to make any measurable benefit overall unless you specifically run a site with a very geographically distributed user base. Even for sites with a NA/European user base you can host in either US or Europe and it makes no difference. The latency is not significant compared to other performance issues.

staplers 8y ago
Block 3rd party scripts by default and its amazing how many pages will simply not load at all. CDNs will eventually exert their power if this practice keeps growing. I imagine data mining for CDNs is very lucrative given they interface customer AND business.
- kingsleyokei 8y ago
  Since you use the phrase "by default" when you say they block 3rd party scripts, I'm assuming you are aware that the weakness can be overcome by simply turning-off that feature from withing the CDN Provider's Web Interface. At least I know Cloudflare allows that.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - staplers 8y ago
    they block 3rd party scripts "They" who? I am blocking 3rd party scripts with uBlock..
gamegod 8y ago
And HTTP/2 further reduces the benefit of a CDN for small assets (vs. no CDN), since requests are asynchronous and multiplexed, giving you better performance.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
dxhdr 8y ago
> There is also very little benefit to putting pages on a CDN. Well, you can often pay much less for bandwidth than alternate solutions.

kbuchanan 8y ago

Agreed. While they're not fully static, our websites are used in tens of thousands of schools nationwide. A CDN (no matter the provider) was getting blocked by some district somewhere for some reason or another (dedicated IP or not). This created all sorts of failover overhead for us. In the end, we bagged the CDN (for the main services, at least).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

While I certainly agree that there are lots of reasons not to use a CDN, Netlify is pretty cool and useful for certain purposes. I've started using them for a 'static' blog via Hugo and someone (not me) figured out a clever way of having comments powered by Webmentions which relies on Netlify's API to trigger rebuilds (it's nice because it results in the ability to have a Javascript-free site without paying money for some comment-service or having to have my own server to host comments on; it can be done just with a free Gitlab/Github account).