[Issue 11274] Use a CDN for dlang.org

[via Digitalmars-d-bugs]

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11274

--- Comment #4 from Vladimir Panteleev <thecybershadow at gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Martin Nowak from comment #3)
> For an opionion I'd hope to draw a bit on Vladimir's vast experience for
> this (CC).

Hmm, I wouldn't really say my experience is that vast...

As a webmaster, I do have a website with a lot of hits behind CloudFlare's free
plan. I haven't encountered any issues with it, and it pretty much works as
advertised.

As a user, CloudFlare hasn't been very nice. While I still used the Opera 12
browser, I would get hit by CloudFlare CAPTCHAs very regularly. Apparently I
was being "punished" for having an unusual user-agent. For this reason, I have
set CloudFlare's protection setting to "essentially none" on my websites, with
no noticeable negative effect.

I think we should consider using a CDN when we actually start feeling that we
need to. As far as I know our uptime and response time has been pretty good,
and we don't host a lot of assets (large images or such) that would benefit a
lot from a CDN. When we do need to, and should we pick CloudFlare, I recommend
to also set the protection level to the minimum, as we have no dynamic content
to protect and as such the user frustration from false positives is not worth
it.

FWIW, it's worth considering that the reason why CloudFlare's free plan is
profitable is likely because it grants them a ton of analytics into users'
browsing habits, so if user privacy is of any consideration that would be one
downside.

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