Tag Archives: Google

Cloudflare – protect your website

30 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by in On Technology

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A month ago, I wrote about the Google Page service.  The Page Service caches your static content and serves it up from their servers for faster page views.It sounds great in theory, and perhaps it will perform well in practice.  Currently, it’s still in a beta period and available to only a small set of webmasters.While I was researching that article, I stumbled upon a service called Cloudflare.  Cloudflare already does what the Google Page service does, but also protects your sites from known threats like spambots, can auto-minify your site’s CSS and Javascript files, hides your email address from any spambot that may get through, and a whole bunch of other cool sounding stuff.

Basically, they level the playing field for small websites. A small website no longer has to pay large sums of money to get the security and reach that giant, corporate websites get.  And somehow, Cloudflare manages to do it all for free.

I immediately put my wife’s site, www.branderphoto.com, onto the service.  It took only a few minutes to setup, and as long as you have access to your domain’s nameservers, it shouldn’t take longer than that.  Within an hour, Cloudflare was protecting our site.  It was cool to view the source on the page and see how their email protection hid email addresses.

Click for full image

I was very happy to see the threat panel. Over the last 30 days, Cloudflare intercepted 759 threat visits from 52 unique sources. I can view each threat from my dashboard.  I see their IP address, what kind of threat it is, how dangerous the threat was, the country the threat came from, and what happened to it.  Cloudflare maintains a list of IP addresses that are running bots and when a visitor from one of those IPs shows up, they are presented with a Captcha challenge. If the user can pass the captcha, they can gain access to the site. If it was a real person, the can leave a message as well.  This helps you make sure that real people are getting to the site.

As of right now, all of the threats were real and I have not had an issue with actual users being blocked.

As an owner of a website, it’s a no brainer to run my site through Cloudflare.

I wear another hat, though. I am also the Vice President of Technology at Mindscape.  Over the last few months, our bandwidth usage has gone through the roof.  We have taken a number of different measures to try and curtail the rising bandwidth costs, but nothing has really taken hold.

Not long after I started using Cloudflare for branderphoto.com, I decided to start sending our images and files from our webTRAIN platform through Cloudflare.  Each website on our platform serves its assets from one of four specific subdomains. So, I could essentially serve 90% of webTRAIN images by protecting those 4 subdomains with Cloudflare.

There were two things I needed to do.  First, I needed to upgrade to the pro plan. It’s $20 a month for the first website, $5 for each additional pro site in your account.  I needed it in order to serve a secure version of the files into the admin of our platform. I received the additional bonus of 15 minute increments on my stats, instead of 24 hours like the free sites have.

Secondly, I needed to do something about video.  Cloudflare protection and video served from the protected domain don’t mix well.  Embedding a YouTube video is fine, and so is serving your video from an unprotected subdomain.  So, while I tested the file serving idea on a small portion of our sites, our team got to work on making sure all video passed through a “video only” subdomain.

The small subset of files went great. We were saving a GB or two of bandwidth a day.

Well, on Sunday, I deployed our teams video solution and flipped the switch on our busiest file serving subdomain.  Check this out:

That’s one day of serving our files through Cloudflare across the busiest section of webTRAIN.  We had averaged about 60 GB a day in bandwidth on the four previous Mondays.  That single subdomain, serving files, was responsible for 25% of that bandwidth!

And check out the request numbers.  81% of the requests were served by Cloudflare and not by our server. That’s a HUGE number and big load off of our own machines!

We’ve been using Cloudflare for a month now, and have slowly put more reliance in it. Turning on our main fileserver to Cloudflare was a big step for us, and 24 hours in, it looks like the right solution for us.

Thanks Cloudflare!

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Google Page Service

29 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by in On Technology

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Do you feel the need, the need for speed? It’s an ongoing battle for coders and webmasters to make their page show up faster. A slow load time can cause the multi-tasking, instant-gratification-needing web generation to move on to another site before you have a chance to show them what your site is all about.

At Mindscape, we’ve made a number of optimizations to try and get our sites to load faster. We’ve re-indexed databases, compressed our many CSS files into a single file, enabled gzip compression on our server, and worked to improved our database queries. On the whole, it’s been very helpful.

Well, Google is coming to the rescue to make it even easier to have a fast page. According to this article, http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/​28/google-page-speed-service/, Google will soon be rolling out a service that will make your site load faster. The idea is that you point your DNS to Google’s server, and it fetches and caches your data to serve it up using a number of performance best practices.

Sounds like a nice theory, but there are a few questions.

1) What about dynamic content? Will it handle that well?
According to Matthew Prince, from Cloudflare (more on Cloudflare later), the method they are using won’t work well with dynamic content. He linked to a blog on his site, but I was unable to view the blog post. So, we’ll have to wait and see if Google handles this well.

2) Will Google use this to influence their search result? It’s been said that your load times can influence your search ranking. So if that’s the case, and you can pay Google to have faster load times, does that create a conflict of interests. I may be naive, but I like to think that Google has good intentions and would not push this as a way to directly influence their search rankings.

3) How well does it work? I decided to try it out for myself to see. You can test their service here:
http://code.google.com/speed/pss/index.html

Click to see the full image

First, I tested www.BranderPhoto.com, my wife’s photography business. It runs on webTRAIN, Mindscape’s powerful marketing and content management system. Brander Photo is using compressed CSS, so the load time for CSS files is low, but it has a lot of big images, which can be slow.

The test was run from the California server. It certainly looks as if it helps. However, it was interesting that on the repeat visit test, the original site was faster. That tells me that our CSS compression is helping, and after having the images locally, there wasn’t much time spent waiting on files. Good job webTRAIN! See the full test here: http://goo.gl/DBVEv

On the second test, I used our current Mindscape website. It is also on webTRAIN, but never received the compressed CSS update. So, there are a lot of CSS files that need to be downloaded the first time.

Click to see the full image

Google Page Service can speed up that content by about 50%. That’s a big increase!

The full test is here: http://goo.gl/tBjZ7

It certainly appears that Google Page Service can speed up your site. I’m interested in how it will work with a dynamic site, and not just a static page.

A competitor?
I saw a lot of comments from the Cloudflare team in the comments to the original article. I checked out their website (http://www.cloudflare.com/overview.html), and I was intrigued. It seems that you can get what Google is offering, and more, for free. I did not see a way to test their performance increase, so I’ve updated one of our less used sites to point to Cloudfare in an attempt to see if it can do what it says. It will take some time for the DNS to update, so watch for a follow up article in a week or two.

I’m most intrigued by something that has been plaguing us for a while, bandwidth lost to crawlers and bots. Cloudflare says: “We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources.”

Now that’s something I can get excited about!

Conclusion
It appears that Google’s Page Service can help speed up your website. However, you may also want to check out Cloudflare in the meantime. It also looks like both services may have trouble with sites that are dynamic or that stream video, so you’ll want to do some research or try with a low volume site, before you dive in and make the change.