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by rgbrenner 4003 days ago
I think Cloudflare provides a great service, but when I used it (a couple of years ago for one of my other websites), I wasn't impressed with the performance of their CDN.

It's certainly not a replacement for their DDOS/security features. Nuevo Cloud is solely about improving the performance of low/medium traffic websites. And from my testing (on both nuevocloud.com and one of my other websites), the performance is the best I've seen from a CDN (I'm clearly biased, but numbers are numbers).

3 comments

Firstly, from a non biased, completely subjective point of view, that is one of the quickest loading pages I've seen in a while. A great showcase for the service, congrats on getting it out there.

I had a few questions I don't see answers to on the landing page:

Do you support pushing to edge nodes? Do you support the Vary header across things like Accept & Accept-Encoding? Is the $25/mo for 100GB across multiple domains? Any plans for higher tiers?

Out of interest, how big is the team behind this? What's your background? Would be interested to hear of how you go about setting this up to be quicker than the competitors, and what lessons you've learnt along the way.

All in all it looks really compelling - Good luck with it.

Thanks. I've been working on this for quite a while, and I'm excited to finally launch. Still have a lot of work to do on it though.

Do you support pushing to edge nodes? Push zones won't be implemented until later this year.

Do you support the Vary header across things like Accept & Accept-Encoding? Accept-encoding is used to decide if the reply is gzip'd, but other than that no. If you email me, I'll let you know when I'm finished implementing Vary.. it'll probably be this weekend.

Is the $25/mo for 100GB across multiple domains? yes. there's no limit on the number of domains.

Any plans for higher tiers? Yes.. there will be a couple of larger plans. In the meantime, you're welcome to email me if you need a larger plan.

The team is just me. I built this because it seems like every CDN focuses on enterprises, instead of the startup type websites I usually work on. I feel like most CDNs are a catch-22.. to get good performance at the edge, your website has to be popular enough to cache... but if your website is slow, no one is going to use it, so the CDN doesn't cache it. So this actually caches your files at the edge, even in areas where your website is less popular (so you can actually build up an audience in that area of the world).

As far as the website being quicker, it uses a web app framework I've developed over the past decade + the CDN (which I wrote in Golang and C). I've worked on various startups over the past 14 years (nothing big though).

How are you "clearly biased"?
rgbrenner is the poster of this link and seems to be developing the project.
Yes, this is my project. I probably could have made that clearer.
Thanks, I just saw that on your profile. Normal practice would be to include "Disclosure: this is my project" or similar in your comments.
How are you testing the performance?
Mostly real browser synthetic monitoring from 24 locations. Obviously that's not exactly real world (since those servers are in a datacenter), but it's reasonable close.

I also use Nuevo Cloud (and have used other CDNs) on one of my ecommerce websites that gets a couple thousand people/day. So there's google anayltics timing stats, but those aren't the most accurate.

Of course, this is very different than the performance monitoring that's done for Nuevo Cloud. It's much easier when you have access to the actual servers to track performance stats and work to improve those (compared to trying to compare real world performance versus another CDN).

Actually this is not a good test. Synthetic monitors live in data centers and you are testing the performance from one data center to another. You need RUM.
Yes, I completely agree it's not the best test. Real user monitoring would be much better.