Martin wrote:So, besides their not supporting the deflate/gzip modules I've got enough reasing to look around and switch (after having checked their gzip policy
)
Your host should really enable this, or they will eventually lose customers. Google SEO now rate website based on their "page speed" performance, and compression is an important part of this. Therefore, any person with some knowledge of this would (and should) dismiss their services. They should know, because they are shooting themselves in the foot, even if they are a good host in regards to everything else ...
Martin wrote:If Cloudflare is free and speeds up my website, even after switching to a hosting service with compression capablities, I'm very interested in your manual 'Cloudflare for X3 websites'
I have been testing Cloudflare lately, and indeed it is a very good solution considering it is free. I would perhaps still consider finding a host that serves compressed output, or getting your current host to change their policy. Even if you use Cloudflare, html/json output isn't by default stored on the CDN, and therefore they would still need to be output from your server on a per-request basis. I believe Cloudflare would likely compress the file when it passes their proxy server, but it is still not optimal, as Cloudflare still needs to request the files uncompressed from your server before passing them on ...
Martin wrote:Afterthought: if everyone would be using Cloudflare, would that make your using the Amazon CDN superfluous?
From a technical perspective, that is a correct assumption, and also something we asked ourselves some time ago. However, from a pure CDN-perspective, Cloudflare is to some disadvantage:
- Cloudflare is a full-on service for the entire domain, and you don't have full control of how certain assets are cached on their server.
- Because it uses your domain, you lose the benefit of loading assets from a "cookie-less" domain.
- Because it uses your domain, you lose the possible advantage of "parallel loading" assets.
- Cloudflare is "almost" as fast as other CDN services, and honestly I don't know how they can do it for free, but dedicated CDN services seem slightly faster in terms of just serving static assets.
- We would lose the benefit of having a "common" URL for X3 assets, which increases the chance that some visitors already have the item in their cache.
- If your server outputs wrong headers for css/js files (for example cache headers), this will just be passed on by Cloudflare. This is unlikely, but combined with the above, essentially it just means I don't entirely trust Cloudflare for this.
Essentially though, you are correct. If your domain is running through Cloudflare, then you would likely have almost the same benefits as loading the same js/css from a dedicated CDN. There are the possible factors above though. The most powerful combination, is to use both Cloudflare and a dedicated CDN (for images) in combo, something we will be offering with our own X3 Hosting, available shortly:
https://forum.photo.gallery/viewtopic.php?t=8415