[site update] Serving images from a CDN
Howdy, just a quick site update: as part of my preparations for Blender Artists migration project, I’ve started looking into Content Delivery Networks. Before, I relied on CloudFlare to speed up hosting of images and other static files, but a CDN has other advantages – geographic distribution being the most important. After reading several comparisons and reviews, and comparing pricing I’m testing BelugaCDN now.
If all works well, images will now be served from a datacenter that’s closer to you or faster for you (those are not always the same thing on the internet). Can you tell a difference in speed? Please also let me know if you see any problems on the site.
Best of luck, Bart! Both this page and BA are so valuable to the Blender community. Good to know they’re in such good hands!
Thanks Paul! Did you notice any difference in speed? Australians should benefit I think.
Bart the web site seems a lot quicker pages load faster and flicking through pages is twice the speed at least for me. Cheers from Australia
Curious about the reason for this choice – I (ab)use CloudFlare myself for hdrihaven, getting about 15 TB of bandwidth each month (about half of that is cached, the other half handled by my puny VPN).
Were you having problems with cloudflare? Why is beluga better? Just comparing their maps (https://www.belugacdn.com/map.pdf vs https://www.cloudflare.com/network/) it seems CF would have an advantage, especially in Africa and Central Asia. CF is certainly a lot cheaper for me ($20 flat rate vs $150).
I guess I’m missing some important difference between them.
As I understand it, CloudFlare doesn’t do geographical distribution – CDN’s reroute traffic to static assets to geographically close datacenters.
Fast for me (currently @DenBosch/NL) but not noticably faster than before