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Some of us are not serving our blogs through Cloudfare. In fact, I'm using a 5 year old entry-level Synology NAS located in my apartment to serve mine. I do tha
by boricj 2y ago
Some of us are not serving our blogs through Cloudfare. In fact, I'm using a 5 year old entry-level Synology NAS located in my apartment to serve mine. I do that because it's already always-on by policy and therefore doesn't cost me anything extra to serve my blog from there, besides the DNS domain name.
Badly behaved RSS readers that download feeds uncached are wasting orders of magnitude more of bandwidth and CPU (gotta encrypt it for HTTPS) on my end than well-behaved clients that get served 304s. Some of them don't even set "Accept-Encoding: gzip" and download it uncompressed. That's hundreds of kilobytes per request wasted for nothing.
My blog doesn't see enough traffic to make this an issue for me, but I can see why this could be a real problem for popular blogs with loads of traffic.
- madeofpalk 2y agoI think it's generally a poor idea to serve a blog, especially a popular one with loads of traffic, from an entry-level Synology NAS.
- boricj 2y agoIt's kept up-to-date automatically. It is appropriately firewalled to only expose ports 80 and 443, the administration panel and the rest of the services hosted on it are only reachable from my LAN. It only serves static content, no scripting language is enabled. A determined attacker might be able to get in despite all of these precautions, but it's at least administered in a somewhat responsible manner. I highly doubt most servers exposed on the internet are.
- oliwarner 2y agoRight, and if you stuck that behind (eg) Cloudflare via cloudflared, it'd be faster for your readers, more secure for you (no direct access) and have no impact on your network or NAS's resources. Right tools for the job. It's not a failing to use a cache.
- madeofpalk 2y agoYou don't even need cloudflare! If your blog is only updated infrequently (>1/day), serving what is essentially static text should not be difficult.
- oliwarner 2y agoThat's right but I'm not making an argument of necessity. I'm saying it's better for both you and your users to keep network traffic at a proper CDN than a home ISP network. It'll be faster for everyone.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoexcept cache is broken on most browsers thanks to https still better than giving up to cloudflare
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoWhat? No it isn’t.
- madeofpalk 2y agoThis is the second time today I've read a HN comment saying that HTTPS and caching are incompatible. Can you explain what you mean by this? I don't understand what you're saying (it seems obviously incorrect?)
- 1oooqooq 2y agovisit any page which should be cached. click any link. unplug. click back. dead end instead of cached page. cache only works on https for extra assets. which is useless if you have a simple static site anyway
- duckmysick 2y agoI just tested it. Can't replicate. Went to https://example.com https://example.com, checked that it's cached in the inspector, clicked on the More information link which leads to https://www.iana.org/domains/example https://www.iana.org/domains/example, unplugged my connection (went offline), clicked back. It showed the cached https://example.com https://example.com. I clicked forward. It showed the cached https://www.iana.org/domains/example https://www.iana.org/domains/example page. Clicked back/forward like a maniac, the pages switched seamlessly. Repeated the same process on a non-cacheable page, it showed a dud when disconnected as expected. Tested on Firefox and Chromium.
- rakoo 2y agoI think it's generally a poor idea to require spending multiple hundreds of dollars to have your website on something you control.
- muppetman 2y agoI think it's a shame that the web has become so bloated with frameworks and images and video and ads that you _can't_ easily serve a highly trafficked website from a ~20Mbps connection. It shouldn't need Clownfare etc.