The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is useful for such website mainly if it attracts substantial traffic and overloads your hosting provider. Please be aware that your website visitors from Germany, France, UK, and Israel will all be served from the Amsterdam server on a free Cloudflare CDN account. If you have a high traffic website, we recommend giving a try BunnyCDN. It will store a permanent cache of your website’s static files like CSS, JS, fonts, and images in the Frankfurt server and provide them from there to the local cache of about 10 servers across Europe. Your origin server will be left with the task of delivering HTML files to the visitors, reducing the bandwidth load at the origin by at least thirtyfold. BunnyCDN services will cost you just $1 per month. It is a much better option compared to upgrading the level of your subscription with your original hosting provider.
If your website is hosted on a LiteSpeed Web server, and you need to unload some traffic to the CDN provider, your best option is a QUIC.cloud CDN. It provides 10 GB of free traffic per month and is priced similarly to the BunnyCDN for traffic above this threshold.
Google Web Vitals is a new set of metrics that Google uses to evaluate the technical health of a website. While webmasters around the world have been busy optimising for keywords for ranking higher on Google, Web Vitals appears as the new kid on the block and could cause unexpected problems. Let’s say you’re doing content marketing with lots of blogs and long-form pillar content. In a perfect world, the local store’s website would only attract customers who are physically nearby. But in the real world, your website will attract visitors from all over the world. In fact, according to statistics, up to 2/3 of your traffic will come from outside United Kingdom.
Google is unaware that you are a local business only interested in UK customers, and its Web Vitals metrics are ignoring borders. Google uses the Chrome User Experience Report to generate a Web Vitals field score. The metrics are calculated from the set of Chrome users from all over the world and the data collected from them. While Google strikes a balance by ignoring 25% of the worst data that the Chrome browser reports from your actual visitors, you need to make sure you’re serving the remaining 75% with fast-loading pages.
So be careful when you say your site only has customers from the UK; there is a significant global English-speaking community around the UK! Even a local business based in the UK might need to optimise their website for global traffic.
If you have visitors from outside of Europe and the UK, you will have to use CDN to improve your page loading speed. Please continue to read this post to understand the best configuration you can have.
The remote location of the original server can introduce substantial latency for the visitors. The Content Distribution Network (CDN) services have been developed to overcome this issue by storing a local cache of your data in different data centres (or point-of-presence POPs) distributed worldwide.
By utilising CDN, the content can be served fast to the visitor because information travels a shorter distance. Also, you save the overall computing power and bandwidth of your original server.
Another common use case for CDNs is DDoS attack mitigation. Many CDN providers include features to monitor and filter requests to edge servers. These services analyse web traffic for suspicious patterns, blocking malicious attack traffic while allowing reputable visitor traffic.
Sites that receive substantial internet traffic work best with pull CDNs. The content is served slowly from your origin for the local data centre’s first user and is cached there. Any subsequent visitor will get access to the cached content much faster with significantly lower latency. However, if files are not requested again in several hours, they will be automatically cleared from the cache. The websites with a substantial volume of internet traffic to all pages should benefit from such CDN.
Sites with a lower amount of internet traffic will fare better with the push CDNs. The content is put onto the CDN servers and stored permanently rather than re-pulled. The content is cached until it is deleted or purged because a new version of the page is created. The push CDN servers are just mirroring your website’s cache created at the origin and are always ready to serve your local visitors.
Until recently, push CDN architecture was not possible. Nevertheless, most CDN providers rush to implement some elements emulating the push architecture for low traffic websites.
For instance, Amazon CloudFront CDN provides two additional levels of caching. CloudFront created a set of dedicated Regional Edge Caches with a much larger cache capacity than an individual edge data centre. It allows Regional Edge Caches to keep more of your content closer to your viewers, even when the content is not popular enough to remain at a local data centre cache. The CloudFront also uses an Origin Shield to provide an additional unified caching layer in front of your origin. The requests to your origin server from all of CloudFront’s Regional Edge Caches go through Origin Shield, increasing the likelihood of a cache hit. Origin Shield is a dynamic mirror of the origin server cache. Origin Shield stores its data within the Regional Edge Cache server with the lowest latency to your origin.
However, BunnyCDN is only the first part of the story. Many websites will have dynamic HTML files, which have to be different for different visitors, especially logged-in users. The obvious examples include eCommerce websites or blogs with comments. Most CDN, including CloudFront and Bunny CDN, will struggle to the various degree to distinguish between static and dynamic HTML pages. And therefore, most CDN services do not cache HTML files at all.
There is a full similarity between the automatic replication of content across five geo-storage servers of BunnyCDN Perma-Cache and automatic replication of Workers KV database across all 200 Cloudflare CDN PoP servers. The main difference is the fact that the Workers KV database keeps copies of HTML files only. And BunnyCDN Perma-Cache does not store the HTML files (unless you have a fully static website). Therefore both systems are nicely integrating.
APO capability to serve HTML files at the Edge while referring back to the origin if necessary for user-specific content, was confirmed with major eCommerce plugins for WordPress such as WooCommerce, Ecwid eCommerce Shopping Cart, and Easy Digital Download. Unfortunately, APO is not yet a mature product – we discuss its limitations below.
Both APO and Perma-Cache had become available in the Q4 of 2020. Their combination provides a chance to achieve a 100% cache hit even for websites with a modest amount of global internet traffic.
Is it a real push CDN? No, but it is very close to it!
We recommend using the Free Cloudflare plan with the paid add-on such as the Argo services described below. But first, it is necessary to understand the limitation of the Free Cloudflare plan and its paid APO service.
Visitors from the UK, Ireland, France, and Germany visiting websites on a Free Cloudflare plan will be served from their Amsterdam PoP data centre. Occasionally Cloudflare will move their traffic as far as to the Paris PoP. Your website should be on a Cloudflare Business plan ($200 per month) before your visitors from the UK become served from the Manchester-based PoP data centre. The London-based POP data centre serves mostly Enterprise Cloudflare clients. The local Cloudflare data centres will serve your visitors in Hong Kong if your website is on a Business plan ($200 per month). Otherwise, they might be served either locally or with slower traffic from a remote PoP data centre in Singapore, Japan, or occasionally from Los Angeles. While Taiwanese visitors are served from the Japanese PoP server, all visitors in China will receive your internet traffic via the Los Angeles PoP server.
The story is still fluid. Multiple complaints about the availability of Cloudflare PoPs in Japan, Australia, South America, and South Africa are resolved. Currently, Cloudflare provides access to the local PoPs in Melbourn, Sydney, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and Cape Town for websites on the Free plan. When you read about 200+ data centres from Cloudflare, please take into account that many of them are busy serving paid clients, with free clients filling the spare capacities of more remote but less busy PoP data centres. The actual page load overhead caused by using remote PoPs instead of the local one is about 1.0 seconds for visitors in Taiwan or China and about 0.5 seconds for visitors in India (served from Singapore) or South Korea (served from Japan). It might sound insignificant, but if page load times go from just one second to two seconds, you will start losing visitors.
Cloudflare solution for the HTML Edge level caching is based on configuring Page Rules and is well respected. For the website with static pages, the solution is simple enough. You have to write in your Page Rules on the Cloudflare Admin page:
Since Page Rules work on a “first match, first serve” basis, the “catch-all” URL *yourdomain.com/* is at the end of the priority list. Above the catch-all URL, you can place the multiple URLs that should not have full page cache enabled.
With APO, the HTML file request is served from a local Cloudflare CDN cache (if the cached page exists) or the local copy of the Workers KV (if the cached page doesn’t exist on Cloudflare’s CDN). If the HTML page doesn’t exist in the CDN cache or Workers KV database, then Cloudflare will make a single request to your origin server and cache the new page’s HTML. The key advantage is that the HTML files can be copied locally from the Workers KV database to the local Cloudflare PoP server cache. This process does not involve communication with other nodes in the global network. Any following requests will be served much quicker from the cache of the local PoP server.
APO capability to serve HTML files at the Edge while referring back to the origin when necessary for user-specific content is confirmed with major eCommerce plugins for WordPress such as WooCommerce, Ecwid eCommerce Shopping Cart, and Easy Digital Download.
The previously described WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache plugin can serve static HTML relying on a “pull” model instead of Workers KV’s “push” model, which automatically pushes HTML globally. With the old setup, visitors hitting a Cloudflare cache zone in the USA wouldn’t cache HTML assets for visitors in other locations – this means websites weren’t able to efficiently take advantage of Cloudflare’s network from a global content delivery perspective. The APO service is affordable and is worth serious consideration if you want to improve your website’s loading speed for international visitors. However, please be aware that paying for this service improves the TTFB only for the first visitor on the local Cloudflare PoP server. For the next visitors, you will have very low TTFB, but the free WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache plugin will achieve the same improvement.
With Tiered Caching included in the Argo subscription, Cloudflare moves towards building the Regional Edge Caches similar to CloudFront’s original concept. However, they are trying to make it more sophisticated by promising to select the exact location of such Regional Edge Caches dynamically via Smart Topology. The goal is to maximise the cache hit ratio by identifying the best regional data centre with the lowest latency to the origin. Such the best PoP centre is assigned as a geo-regional node for making requests to the origin. With Smart Topology, selected regional data centres are becoming reverse proxies to the origin for other local PoP data centres. This is a step in the right direction, but we prefer the BunnyCDN Perma-Cache option:
In the previous section, we explained that the best available options for accelerating the delivery of the static and dynamic HTML files consist of two separate steps:
To optimise the delivery of the static assets, we have to use Perma-Cache architecture provided by BunnyCDN. Luckily, Cloudflare and BunnyCDN can be integrated to work together.
First, you have to use a cPanel to create a subdomain and point it to the same docroot as the main site.
From the WordPress Dashboard, navigate to LiteSpeed Cache > CDN. Set up CDN mapping with the new subdomain:
BunnyCDN provides the possibility to use their five Geo-Replicated edge-storage data centres as the Perma-Cache. It means that all files pulled from the origin server are captured, replicated across different Storage Zones, and permanently kept there. When the cache expires on an edge POP server, it pulls content from the nearest Storage Zone location instead of your origin server. It is the best implementation of the push CDN available in the market and will significantly reduce the latency of loading your fixed assets.
It is possible to set up separate Cron Jobs to automatically warming up the cache on the original hosting server and warming up the Perma-Cache of BunnyCDN and Workers KV database of the Cloudflare CDN. This way, we can assure 100% cache hit in the CDN network and fast page speed loading even after purging all cache when forced by various website updates.
Please be aware that BunnyCDN does not support live streaming video services. You can use KeyCDN’s video CDN to help supercharge your HTTP live streaming. KeyCDN has its own Push Zone service, but it is not yet a Geo-Replicated version.
QUIC.cloud is the first major competitor to Cloudflare. They’ve made a massive wave by announcing unique features that have forced Cloudflare to respond in a rush by introducing APO services.
QUIC.cloud is a reverse proxy CDN similar to Cloudflare, but unlike Cloudflare, it is fully integrated with the LiteSpeed Web Server and LiteSpeed Caching Engine. QUIC.cloud will ultimately have more functionalities as it is more deeply entangled in your website than the Cloudflare APO. QUIC.cloud communicates with the LiteSpeed extension on your backend to figure out which pages have changed and purges them selectively from the cache.
Since June 2021, QUIC.cloud has been in production stage with the cache keeping time increased to 24 hours. Now, it is comparable to CloudFlare CDN, and we recommend switching to QUIC.cloud for all users of LiteSpeed hosting.
QUIC.cloud has a smaller number of PoP servers if compared to Cloudflare. It has 10 PoPs in the USA, 10 PoPs in Europe, and a single PoP presence in Turkey, Russia, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, and Canada. But this is good news if you serve users in the UK. With Cloudflare, your UK visitors will be served from Amsterdam and sometimes from Paris PoP. Only the expensive Business Cloudflare plan ($200 per month) will ensure that your UK visitors are served locally. With QUIC.cloud, your users will always be served from the local London PoP.
If you are using a LiteSpeed web host provider, QUIC.cloud CDN might accelerate your web pages’ loading and the traffic will go back to the origin server only for dynamic HTML pages required on eCommerce websites.
The pricing for QUIC.cloud traffic is similar to the price charged by BunnyCDN. Depending on the path taken by the QUIC.cloud development team, they have a chance to replace both Cloudflare for the edge HTML delivery and the BunnyCDN. The actual fierce competition will only improve options available to us, end-users.
When using a good CDN provider, it may look like you no longer need to worry about your hosting provider. If you have enough traffic, serve your static content and your HTML files via QUIC.cloud CDN. The most common use of an origin server will be for editing and management of a WordPress site. This is a great starting point for an informational brochure website. Building a website with visitor comments, subscription pages, or an online store? Your choice of web hosting still affects how easily you can scale traffic to your website when serving dynamic PHP requests.
If your website only has a small amount of traffic and serves users in a single country such as Germany, it might make more sense to find a great local web hosting option rather than relying heavily on CDN providers.
We offer a variety of services, including branding design, eCommerce development, and technical SEO optimisation. Our consulting can help you select the best web hosting provider for your business so that you have access to all the tools you need without any challenges. We are a small company, but we can manage all your needs.
