[Issue 11274] Use a CDN for dlang.org

[via Digitalmars-d-bugs]

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

--- Comment #5 from greenify <greeenify at gmail.com> ---

Adding some thoughts of mine to the discussion:

> 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.

Yep I have experienced this as well :/

> 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.

We have quite some troubles with it on Travis in terms of reliability and I
think our "fast" pageload could even improved ;-)
In fact if one looks at these page checkers, e.g.

https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/RHG4Q/dlang.org
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/dlang.org/5AUbSaw8
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=dlang.org

There are a couple of other things one could do, e.g:

- leverage browser caching
- optimize images
- serve scaled images
- enable compression
- minify CSS & javascript

> 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.

Speaking of no dynamic content: as we have nearly no dynamic content, we could
also think about using S3, GitHub Pages (free) or similar for dlang.org.
AFAIK GitHub Pages also come with a CDN.

> 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.

There's also the Amazon CloudFront CDN (and others), but one needs to pay per
traffic and IIRC it isn't that cheap.

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