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I think you are conflating general Content Delivery Networks with “shares JavaScript library repositories that happen to use a CDN”. While the “it’s a shared re

I think you are conflating general Content Delivery Networks with “shares JavaScript library repositories that happen to use a CDN”. While the “it’s a shared repo of common JS files so it’s already cached” idea never really worked (you are right about the added cost of DNS + tcp/TLS) general Content Distribution Networks absolutely provide performance benefits by delivering your static (and optionally dynamic) content from edge nodes that are much geographically closer to the visitor. Usually these CDNs front the entire site origin, so you dont have extra dns/overhead for subdomains like shared JS repos. (I work with many IR Top 100 retailers, and I’ve helped to build the dashboards comparing edge vs origin. It’s valuable even for sites where the majority of the visitors are in the US, and especially so if you have a substantial international audience)

nullwasamistake 7y ago
When they front the origin there's definitely an advantage, I agree. But that implies: You allow a CDN to host your initial asset, possibly a security risk You only use that one CDN for most/all non-dynamic content. When latency becomes that important I would rather host my own AS. Giving CDN the origin and your first content load is effectively handing off your entire site security to a third party. At that scale you could easily and cheaply run multi-homing on your own AS in maybe 10 colos across the world. Maybe 100k a year to eliminate third party risk. Maybe worth it? I think so