Cloudflare Images

I wondered what you guys thought of Cloudflares new image serving service.

I’ve moved away from using SIRV (back to self hosting) as it affected Google page experience metrics quite severely.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-cloudflare-images/

What’s your thoughts?

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It looks definitely interesting and worth trying for some real-world comparison. But you’ll need to be willing to spend $6 a month.

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Thanks for bringing this to the forum. I used CloudFlare Pro previously for several years and one of the key features was the ability to take Jpgs and handle WebP conversion, then automatically serve them whenever it was supported by the browser. No complaints there.

Eventually I started to tire of the cache complications though when updating sites or when having to troubleshoot conflicts with the server, especially because CloudFlare support can be really slow at the worst moment when you need it most.

I ran some pretty exhaustive tests and found that my site was loading faster 90% of the time without CloudFlare for my target visitors here in the UK and it’s all been rather more easy to manage since then.

We definitely need some kind of option for this and I’ll keep it mind, especially with support arriving for AVIF. In the meantime I would really hope something can be done inside Blocs along the lines of the plugin stack below or better if Norm has something in mind. On one recent image heavy site the pages were weighing in at around 6mb each and I would gladly trim those down with a more efficient image format.

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Yeah all my sites are running under cloudflare pro with the webp thingy. Initially I had a few issues with caching, more the ones with hsts enabled; but I’ve managed to find away around this.

I found that CF seems to work best with servers that have very basic setups. The moment you start adding Nginx or LiteSpeed things can become very sticky indeed, then if you flush the CF cache it can take a long time before it is properly updated across their network.

It’s been a couple years now, so maybe it has improved. In my experience CF is most useful if your web host is not brilliant, because it can smooth over some of the weaknesses. If you have good web hosting it becomes less useful in many cases.

If you want to go the CF route you can set the rules to cache everything and then it becomes pretty awesome for serving video if you stay within the space limit.

Curious about the hsts because I use that on all my own sites.

I’ve been with them a few years now after one of my sites was taken down with a DOS blitz, which was an absolute mare to recover from. They’ve steadily improved over this time.

I will openly admit, I (now) use cheap ass hosting to run some really high traffic sites through Cloudflare :slight_smile: A lot of our visitors are from outside the UK which is where Cloudflare seems to shine for us.

Yes it was global network that first garnered my interest in CF thinking about e-commerce sales around he world at the time.

A few years back I was using a fairly expensive VPS and it was great, though the cost was hard to justify, so I tried switching to a shared hosting package, while leveraging CF. Looking at the stats I could see that CF was handling 90% of the bandwidth but I was seeing quite a few reliability issues, which wasn’t the case when I had the VPS.

Then I changed web host again to a cloud based option and saw the CF bandwidth drop to around 5%, which was quite revealing, however I also found I was having more issues on the sites running CF than the ones without, due to options like rocket loader and railgun. When I removed those sites from CF the speed was similar, however I saved myself some hassle with less troubleshooting.

I don’t think CF is automatically always a good or bad thing. It’s just a case of whether it fits your needs or not.

Wow, that was an interesting read. Thank you for sharing your findings.

After reading the documentation, it looks time consuming.

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Where my cheap ass hosting + Cloudflare does fail somewhat is when I use background images. These aren’t cached by Cloudflare and usually the most significant drop in performance; I have found a workaround for this though.

I’d certainly agree Cloudflare isn’t for everyone, pretty there are better solutions out there.