We found when developing the site that DigitalOcean was fast - and even though it's located overseas, we still found it 2 seconds faster for Australian users. The site had already been running through CloudFlare for some time but on a shared host in Sydney (which is also where most of the customers are). The site, running on PHP, was taking about 7 seconds to load. In mid-2018 we made a big push for speed on the site. Key allows for explicitly denying cookies to be set on a zone/domain cookies are a big strain on limited upload bandwidth so to be able to force these off is great - Cloudflare adds a cookie to every header… for “performance reasons”… but remember “if you’re getting a product something for free…” See more Key allows JPEG/WebP image requests based on clients ‘accept’ http headers - imgix required a ?auto=format query string on each image resource request - which can break some caches. Key allow for a custom CNAME (no more advertising in domain requests and possible SEO improvements - and easier to swap to another host down the track). There’s a few things that we like about “Key” apart from saving $6 a month on the monthly minimum spend ($4 vs $10 for imgix).

So we’ve moved Washington Brown from imgix for hosting theme images, to Ke圜DN for hosting all images and static assets (Font, CSS & JS). The results for the endpoints were superfast - almost 200% faster than CloudFlare in some tests and 370% faster than imgix. Platform Update: we’ve been using the Performance Test tool provided by Ke圜DN for a long time in combination with Pingdom's similar tool and the #WebpageTest and #GoogleInsight - we decided to test out Ke圜DN for static asset hosting.

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