Good evening readers, the week is drawing to a close and we are pretty happy with everything that has happened since launch. That said, into the nitty gritty of the next episode in my techie babble about what makes the Demon Archives run behind the scenes.
Do any of you use Reddit? There is a saying on Reddit that happens when they link to somebodies website. That saying is that the site was “Reddited” which means burned into a fiery cinder and left sobbing in the corner by the sheer onslaught of traffic. You see servers can only handle so much traffic before they just up and die on you, they start rejecting and failing to load, then if it gets to bad the server can destabilize and requires a reboot… this is nasty and is actually a technique used to attack people’s websites called DDOS (distributed denial of service). There are lots of ways to mitigate the benign onslaught of traffic, caching, speedier pages, multiple servers, content distribution networks, minifying, etc.
On our site we are minifying and gzipping all the content. We are setting all the expire cache headers known to man on pretty much everything that we control. We have our assets serving from an image.demonarchives.com subdomain that we’ve narrowed the cookies on. We optimize our images for the web by stripping out any EXIF info, and then we run them through Smush.it on top of that. All that jibberish aside we are taking serious steps to make this website fast and lightweight, both for our servers and for your browsers.
But one awesome thing is quite literally better than all of those together… Mainly because it would do almost all of those together for us if we were too lazy to do so. And that miracle baby is Cloudflare. Cloudflare sits between our server and the internet. It uses a CDN (content distribution network) to store our images and assets on servers around the world. It optimizes cache headers on things, and minifies and gzips scripts and stylesheets. It then goes a step farther by tracking access to your content. Securing against known threats and threatening behavior. Top that all off with some really killer paid features like image preloading, script preloading, image optimization on the fly, image resizing on the fly, and you have a magically machine.
Then they give you another cookie just out of the goodness of their hearts. They rig up and vet some really quality applications to enhance the functionality of your site without you even having to change a line of code. Now, we personally as code freaks install most of the code and plugins ourselves, but their app section did tip us off to some really neat things that we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
Case in point… you see that thing in the sidebar about rewards? You can literally get free gift-cards just for visiting and commenting on a daily basis…. and that is free for you and free for us! We’re still not quite sure how PunchTab is pulling that off. Better yet, PunchTab is powering the joy behind our Rewards and Giveaways. So yeah, that was one little gem we found thanks to CloudFlares’ apps section.
Now, lest you skeptics be sitting around doubting how cool CloudFlare really is. Check out the image down below… Do you see that bandwidth savings? These guys are saving us almost HALF of what would be our normal Bandwidth consumption. THAT IS AMAZING! That can translate to a huge $ savings (not for us since the rockstars at FireHost give a full TB for free and are dirt cheap per GB afterwards), but also it translates into about half as much stress on your server.
Here’s the final kicker, it gets better the more traffic you throw at it. Since Cloudflare is building up its cache based on the stuff that is requested from our server, the more consistent and constant traffic that we get, the faster it gets… Its madness. So yeah, image time:
PS. so bring it on Reddit… no need to use imgur.com on us… we can take it! (And may I live to regret that!)