Hello!
Thanks for the kind words ??
We definitely appreciate any feedback like this as it can always help us improve our services most definitely.
This type of thing however is a bit difficult to diagnose as (I’m sure you can appreciate) there are a ton of factors that may have a part to play in the measurement of site user experience that your performing.
I’ll answer your questions below, and I have a few questions of my own in some of the answers :
(1) I haven’t waited long enough?
The CDN performs a fetch from the geographic endpoint thats nearest to the person requesting the resource.
So if someone from Germany requests your theme’s style.css, the German CDN endpoint will fetch (And subsequently cache for future requests) that file.
If someone from Texas makes the same request, the same thing has to happen. So think of the fetching-then-caching action as dependent on where you are in the world. This is how most CDNs work.
(2) Shift8CDN isn’t the fast CDN that i need?
This is a tough one to answer. There are a few parts of the world that don’t have as good coverage (geographically) as places like Europe, North America and (most) of Asia. For example, China isn’t the greatest because of data exchange costs being a bit too high to justify. We have many other great Asian endpoints.
How are you measuring how fast the CDN is? Are you testing the speed of a specific static element (i.e. a single image file served through the CDN) , or are you measuring the overall site speed when our CDN is enabled?
I just need some specific references of “not fast enough” so I can go ahead and measure. IF you dont mind sharing your site URL as well as what country you are in , that would be helpful for me to test our CDN endpoints nearest to you.
(3) CDN is just not right for my website?
I think generally CDNs are great for any site. The only time it might not make sense is if your site is so minimal and compact (i.e not media heavy and very minimal theme with little to no jQuery), it might not be as needed.
Lets get an idea of what your site URL is and where in the world your located and I can try to run some tests on my side so I can see we are dealing with. Also if you dont mind sharing how your actually testing, that would be helpful too.
If you are willing to spend a bit of time , it would be definitely appreciated because anything I do find I hope to make the service a bit better maybe!
Thanks again ??
