If I cache everything with Cloudflare, does it (from a speed perspective) become irrelevant who my hosting provider is?
Context: I am currently with Siteground. I was thinking of trying a different host to improve site speed - but if I can cache the entire site to the CDN, the speed of my host’s servers should become irrelevant, right?
If your site is completely static then it reduces the impact of your hosting provider, but keep in mind that your entire site won’t be cached all of the time and revalidation can slow the process down substantially.
At @thedaveCA already mentioned, your content would not be permanently cached and when Cloudflare fetches data from your server, you server’s latency will will play a role. Also, content is cached only per-region. So if you have visitors from different regions/countries (or even from the same region, where their ISPs route them differently) Cloudflare will contact your server several times, once per path for each data centre.
That being said, if you really cache everything and your server is just reasonably “slow”, solely depending on Cloudflare’s cache might be a viable option.
The site would only be tweaked a bit once a month. So if it’s truly all cached as I thought, then the hosters speed wouldn’t matter much as Cloudflare would always provide all the speed…