Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobfunk | Hacker News Reader

Seems like strong competition to Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/). Always thought that was their greatest risk, someone with a huge, worldwide, already paid for CDN stepping in an offering the same service.

They still have the statistics and security features going for them, though...

View on HN

Cloudflare does a LOT more than this. In fact, the area where they cross-over is the area that interests me the least - I am quite capable of making a website balls-to-the-wall fast without either of their products, but Cloudflare leverage their size to accomplish things I literally could not accomplish without them. I initially wrote Cloudflare off because of this, they don't do a great job of telling you about the coolest things they do.

Yeah i agree there seems to be some overlap with CloudFlare. I wanted to sign up a client of mine who is running a Wordpress site to CloudFlare, but wasnt able to do so because it required moving their complete zone file over to CloudFlare which they werent able to do for multiple reasons. CloudFlare dont seem to provide a solution where you can just point an A record to their servers (currently).

I wonder if this Google PageSpeed service can provide a similar service to CF, without needing to move the Zone file across completely. Mind you CloudFlare's basic service is free.

Cloudflare does have the ability to let you define CNAMES for your site and manage those in your own DNS outside of Cloudflare. I believe it is in limited beta right now but we are testing it and it works great.

Contact them for more details.

Im a little hazy on my DNS knowledge. I understand upto zone file, dns and A records. Haven't quite understood how i would achieve this with a CNAME? _ i've tried to understand many times what CNAME's are but never got my head around it.

Would you mind elaborating a little? I did contact them about a month ago, and explained the problem and they just told me it wasnt possible at this moment in time(?)

A CNAME points a name to another name. In the case of Cloudflare, Google, or others, they need to know what CNAME you are using (say, www.example.com CNAME some.proxyservice.com) so they can map the request to your content.

We actually have the backend all built for this. It is just a matter of doing just a little bit more testing before releasing it into the wild. We've used a handful of beta testers to help us identify potential problems.

We will have CNAME pointing available in the very near future.

Care to elaborate? I've been wondering what the advantages are but haven't had the time to look into it in more depth. What's been your experience?

Well, I can do all the speed improvement things myself, so I'm interested in some of the weirder things. They can detect bots quite reliably because with a network that large it's pretty damn obvious when something is crawling a site - and they can then strip out or mangle email addresses from your HTML before reaching those bots, so you can have email addresses in plaintext without having them harvested. That's a pretty imaginative solution!

Another thing they can do with their size is automatically identify and react to new attacks, so when a DDOS occurs it very quickly routes the traffic away and updates its ruleset to always be protected against that attack from now on, for all sites behind them.

I don't actually have any experience though as I've never used the service, this is all from their website and from talking to their staff on HN :)

CloudFlare does proxying and cashing for static and dynamic pages too and adds some security stuff. Not sure they minify and compress static resources, though. So, both services look like they are very different. CloudFlare will speed up a dynamic page that loads slowly, Google's service won't.

Cloudflare user here..

Cloudflare does have JS and CSS minify features, as well as some asynchronous JS support.

CloudFlare does have a feature to minimize some resources called Auto Minify. http://blog.cloudflare.com/an-all-new-and-improved-autominif...

Does this mean that by going with Google, you'll also mitigate the risk of DDoS's? Because I know that was one of Cloudfare's advantages, too.

Also http://www.strangeloopnetworks.com (who have some great resources on web performance optimization: http://www.strangeloopnetworks.com/resources/ )

We actually talk about the announcement today on our blog here: http://bit.ly/nLkE9Y

We also do far more than just act as a CDN.

Google have strong statistics/reporting products in other areas and I can't see it being long until they add this into the mix for Page Speed (if they haven't already.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com