If I cache everything with Cloudflare, does it (from a speed perspective) become irrelevant who my hosting provider is?

Performance
#1

Hey everybody :slightly_smiling_face:

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?

Here’s the short How-To on caching everything:

Thank you!

Oliver

#2

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.

#3

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.

#4

Thank you Sandro, thank you Dave for getting back to me on this - I really appreciate it! :slight_smile:

For context, I read this elsewhere:

“Static hosting providers like Netlify are designed for high-performance delivery of static files. It comes with built-in CDN, including HTML.”

Since Cloudflare has the fastest CDN, I figured I might cache an entire static site with Cloudflare instead and get even better results…

Yet now Dave wrote "your entire site won’t be cached all of the time "

Why wouldn’t it be cached all the time with the Cache Everything feature? (Sorry if this is a noob question)

Is there an expiration date by which all of it - or part of it - gets deleted? How does it work in practice?

THANK YOU! :slight_smile:

P.S. Would your answer change if it’s not a static html website but a simple Wordpress site that I am trying to cache in its entirety with CF?

(I’d fix some stuff that could brake by applying page rules as described here: https://wpspeedmatters.com/caching-html-pages-at-the-edge-using-cloudflare/ ).

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…

Thanks again, Oliver

1 Like
#5

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