Cloudflare Comes to MediaTemple

Some­thing worth not­ing for peo­ple look­ing for web­site host­ing is that my host, Medi­aTem­ple just announced that they part­nered up with Cloud­Flare. Cloud­Flare is a CDN, or Con­tent Deliv­ery Net­work. A CDN works by tak­ing “clones” of your web­site, and copy­ing them to var­i­ous locations/servers around the coun­try and in some cases around the world. So instead of hav­ing one loca­tion that every­one goes to when surf­ing, web­site con­tent is served up to your com­puter from the near­est loca­tion. Essen­tially, it trans­lates into increased speed.

100 mil­lisec­onds of wait­ing doesn’t sound like a lot, but there’s been a lot of stud­ies and sta­tis­tics sur­round­ing people’s brows­ing habits. Some stud­ies have claimed that a 100 mil­lisec­ond wait trans­lates into a 2% vis­i­tor loss, and the num­ber increases expo­nen­tially as peo­ple have to wait longer. From a busi­ness per­spec­tive, 2% is a pretty big loss. If you can reduce that wait as Cloud­Flare claims to do (and I’m sure it works), this means peo­ple will stick around longer.

Sec­ondly, Google announced last year that they were going to start fac­tor­ing in web­site page load times into their rank­ing algo­rithm. So the faster your page loads, then that should help your web­site obtain more traf­fic in return. It only makes sense that this is one fac­tor in deter­min­ing a website’s qual­ity. So if you imple­ment a CDN, you will prob­a­bly see a greater return in traf­fic as a result.

My blogs are run­ning on Medi­aTem­ple and I’m using Max­CDN as my CDN. I pay an annual rate for this extra per­for­mance ser­vice, but now that the Cloud­Flare basic plan is free, I’m con­sid­er­ing can­cel­ing my paid service.

The instal­la­tion for Cloud­Flare on Medi­aTem­ple is pretty quick and takes less than 5 min­utes. I’s just a sim­ple mat­ter of reg­is­ter­ing, click­ing a few “next” but­tons, then wait­ing 12–24 hours for every­thing to pop­u­late. I set it up this morn­ing, and by this time tomor­row it should be work­ing. It will be inter­est­ing to see how well it works.