Ever though of becoming a Cloudflare Partner?

[paulg1981]

Have you guys (NFO) ever considered becoming an optimized partner with cloudflare for your hosting? Obviously the bulk of your business is game servers and you don't want an extra hop but some of us (read me) don't host game servers and enjoy the speed and reliability of your services. If you were to partner with them your customers would get the RailGun service from them in addition to the cdn benefits.

/selfish customer request

Just a thought!

[Edge100x]

I have not seen requests for this, so it's a new idea.

In general, customers who have used CloudFlare have not seen performance improvements, and their DDoS resistance drops with CloudFlare in the middle. This may partially be because most of the sites we see using it are dynamic. Any sort of extra layer (even a compressed extra layer) will slow down a dynamic site.

Traditional CDNs do offer additional value, though, by serving static content from multiple locations.

[paulg1981]

I have not seen requests for this, so it's a new idea.

In general, customers who have used CloudFlare have not seen performance improvements, and their DDoS resistance drops with CloudFlare in the middle. This may partially be because most of the sites we see using it are dynamic. Any sort of extra layer (even a compressed extra layer) will slow down a dynamic site.

Traditional CDNs do offer additional value, though, by serving static content from multiple locations.

I actually tried cloudflare when they first came out a couple years ago and I was unimpressed but I gave them a second chance here recently and I have been impressed. It seems that they have hit their stride. My sites have sped up about 50 percent according to numerous page speed tests from various locations. Obviously the speed has not increased dramatically for locations very close to the origin server because of NFO great network but overseas and across the continent the increase is measurable.

As far as the caching of dynamic content not having a speed increase/performance benefits from cloudflare that is the point of their railgun service. More info about it is here

https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun

It is only available for the business ($200/month) plans and unfortunately I am not able to spend that much on a monthly basis (my vds is $90!) but is sure seems like a cool idea and it is offered to customers of optimized partners, hence my post.

Check it out and see what you think. I will value your input.

Paul

[Edge100x]

Yes, that compression service would certainly help in bringing their speed on dynamic pages closer to baseline. They'll still generally be slower than directly-retrieved pages, though, and static content is still served faster through a CDN. (The main benefit of CloudFlare is that it's easier to turn on then a CDN.)

With dynamic pages, there's no real solution for speeding up physically distant clients without multiple synced webservers involved.

Even if they offered a 50% discount to partners, at those price points, it's unlikely we'd have many takers =\.

[.=QUACK=.Major.Pain]

There was someone over at gsptalk claiming he was going to be offering game servers that I think were 100% on cloud. Don't know if it's possible or not. Also claiming no chance of any lag. I guess anyone can make claims.

[Edge100x]

Many people use "cloud" to just mean "hosted on the internet" now. So, our servers could be seen as "cloud servers", as well.

Actually putting game servers into some sort of true cluster with instant migration between nodes has been tried before, and it does not work well. I tested it myself.

[.=QUACK=.Major.Pain]

He was doing the second option you mention using cloud over many locations.
I'll have to see if he got any further.

[.=QUACK=.Major.Pain]

LOL - Just went to his site and appears to be down. Comes up a white page.
Must have crashed and burned with that idea.