Does Cloudflare help or speed up AbanteCart?

[webdevmerc]

Just wondering if anyone is using Cloudflare or other CDNs to help speed up delivery of the AbanteCart store in general?  I applied the "free" one to my hosted account and didn't notice any speed difference at all when I ran a test from both pingdom and gtmetrix.

Is the internal caching enough?  I assume there will still be latency due to geography in general without Cloudflare...

[llegrand]

Interesting question -  here's my take on it:

For just pure speed - the importance is governed by where you site visitors that you service are located.
See my screen shot  of the same site - test with in a few minutes of each location.  The further away I go the slower the delivery.   The server for this website  is located in Chicago and does not have cloudflard enabled,  but it is a Litespeed server which I find does make it quicker usually.

So  you should try running your test with the cloudflare on the different server locations on Pingdom and see what your results show.

There are other benefits to Cloudflare besides speed, security being uppermost in my mind. And if one location goes down the other pickup the slack.

My SOP is if the customer base of a site is US based then I usually don't enable CloudFlare as it gives me one more level of getting everything in sync to worry about. If the site pulls heavily from all over the US and is high traffic, then I will use CloudFlare or if the customer base is international then I usually think it is a good thing. 

Just some thoughts from my testing.

Lee

[webdevmerc]

Thanks for your thoughts...since I force ssl connections, I am not sure if my "free" Cloudflare is even working correctly so I may have to pony up the cash to speed it up for international connections.  The speeds outside the US are pretty horrid (> 10 secs load).

Will have to play around a bit more on it.