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Nah. With http2 you're seriously better off having everything in one place. Avoids overhead of multiple TCP connections and (more importantly) overhead of TLS handshakes.

Might not always be true but in tests I've done on my company's sites the http2 load is always faster with no CDN, even from far away locations.




With plain CDNs, sure. With reverse-proxy caches like Cloudflare, the CDN can be the HTTP2 endpoint.


I would bet it still adds latency unless your site is completely static. For anything that needs to hit your servers you->cloudflare->server is still slower than you->server. On the round trip that's added two extra hops so maybe 100ms.

The golden age of CDN's is over. Their primary advantage was being able to open up many parallel connections using multiple subdomains and the ability to cache across domains.

With http2 multiple connections have become a bad thing and https is mandatory so CDN caching is irrelevant.

On http2 and a tiny AWS instance I can get sub 200ms page loads from anywhere in the US if I host in the midwest. The gain from avoiding multiple HTTP connections, TCP slow starts, and TLS negotiations negates all the speed advantages of using a CDN. Cloudflare might be worthwhile if you get massive traffic but a small Nginx instance can handle hundreds of megabytes per second of traffic.




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