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Too many CDNs ? which one fits best ?

Dear support team,

My hosting company, WPX, just released a new CDN feature : https://wpxhosting.com/knowledgebase/article/156/introducing-the-wpx-cloud-why-your-website-needs-it/

I was wandering how this could run into conflict with your CDN ?

Which one should I use, do you reckon ?

regards,
Greg

  • Adam Czajczyk

    Hi Greg

    I hope you're well today!

    Let me start with explaining a basic different between any CDN and WPMU DEV CDN :slight_smile:

    Any regular CDN, like for example CloudFlare, works "in front" of your site. It's a kind of a "buffer" so the "flow is like this"

    user browser -- (sends request for site -> CDN ->>>

    a) if CDN has all the requested content:

    CDN - (sends requested content to user browser) ---> user browser

    b) if CDN doesn't have all requested content:

    CDN -- (requests content from your server) --> your server --- (responds to CDN) --> CDN (caches the content) -- (responds to browser) --> user browser.

    The WPMU DEV CDN is a bit different as it only serves optimized JS/CSS assets from site so it's kind of "behind" the site. It's similar to when you e.g. include some JS library in your PHP script and you got a choice: you can either download it to your server and include it from there or you can e.g. include it directly from Google. Our CDN would be "equivalent" of including it "from Google", except it automatically adjusts your site to do it.

    I hope this makes sense so far.

    Because of how it works, it shouldn't - and usually does not - interfere with any regular CDN. It can surely work with CloudFlare so I believe it should also work with this one. I don't know this particular CDN and they kinda "brag" about it "not being an ordinary CDN" but I believe they do it only for marketing purposes to stress out that they built it themselves. Which might be a good thing but most important it if it doesn't include any "specific and non-standard" JS/CSS optimiztion features. If it doesn't, it should be all fine. In other words, if it works like any of the popular CDNs around, it should all work together just fine but as always, it's mostly a matter of testing. Fortunately, CDN (nor a regular CDN neither a WPMU DEV CDN for optimized assets) is not something that you set "forever" and if anything turns out to be wrong you can disable any of them.

    If you got any additional questions on this, let me know, pleaes.

    Best regards,
    Adam

    • Greg

      Dear Adam,
      Thank you very much for this answer. Indeed, they love to brag, but to be honest I've been working with them for years and they've always built really neat stuff. If I worked as well as them, I'd brag too !

      In my opinion, coupling WPX and WPMU is the best choice any developer on a budget may do ! The only thing that worries me is that both companies constantly build new features and, in the end, I'm afraid you might end-up building conflicting tools.

      We'll see how it goes with this new CDN integration.

      Thank you very much for all your help lately, if there is anything I can do to make your boss know how great you are, feel free to provide a feedback form or anything :wink:

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