[laumars]

Some organisation do just that. But having your entire site behind CDN does have additional benefits besides mitigating DDoS attacks. Such as allowing you to handle other kinds of service outages more effectively (eg busy pages). They can offer you analytics, allow you to separate different traffic under the same domain name (sometimes handy for SEO), etc. Some CDN providers also do some cool stuff like enable IPv6 on your site even if your origin servers are only running IPv4 - but that's more a niche time saving feature than some "must have" deal breaker.

[rodionos]

I like analytics if the price is less than 50ms per request. We use GA and statcounter for analytics anyways. Charts that show how much static traffic you saved are nice, but with bandwidth close to free, it's not a big deal. CDN analytics need to be better than GA at which point I will not only trade off latency but convert to premium all the way.

[laumars]

> I like analytics if the price is less than 50ms per request. We use GA and statcounter for analytics anyways.

GA would cost you more than 50ms too. More so than a CDN controlled analytics. But obviously that cost with CDN is an upfront latency rather than the more hidden cost with background loading of GA. So arguably GA's cost is less "bad" than the CDN's cost.

Personally speaking, I prefer the CDN approach as it produces web pages with a lower browser footprint which I think does improve the user experience (though I'm not implying that GA give a bad user experience!).

GA does give a greater breadth of information than CDN analytics though. Often that's the real deal breaker since analytics is usually driven by project managers / clients rather than by the developers.

> Charts that show how much static traffic you saved are nice, but with bandwidth close to free, it's not a big deal.

Oh it's definitely a big deal if you serve high traffic websites ;) I've spent hours working against those kind of reports on projects that were seeing 100k concurrent users. I will say that these graphs aren't so much about judging what bandwidth can be saved but more about judging what requests can be offloaded. The idea being the fewer calls to your origin servers you need to make, the more resources you have available in your farm for generating the dynamic content (dynamic content you cannot cache!). This also has the potential to save you money in server costs (depending on how they're licenced) as well as improving site performance at peak times.

> CDN analytics need to be better than GA at which point I will not only trade off latency but convert to premium all the way.

Indeed. GA will likely always be better from an account management perspective. But as a devops engineer, CDN analytics fulfils my needs. The great thing is that we have a multitude of options we have available :)

[rodionos]

Unfortunately, CDN analytics is no alternative to GA so it's either/or kind of choice for us. Hence, full proxy type of CDN means that latency is additive.

[laumars]

I wasn't aware the point of our discourse was for me to sell your business additional CDN services ;)

In all seriousness though, it might help to look beyond the very specific set up of your present company when asking about why other people opt for other CDN services. But for what it's worth, I've not experiences the same degree of latency issues with either Cloudflare nor Akamai that you've described. And I have done extensive load tests.