It's not that I need a CDN in any way, since the traf­fic for this site is lit­tle and the way the site is built is light, but hey, it's free, easy to set­up and easy to leave when I feel like it. And I ex­pect to have sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er traf­fic even­tu­al­ly af­ter I fin­ish some not-­so-se­cret project­s.

What's Cloud­Flare's ser­vice? They take over your DNS, then put a re­verse proxy be­tween your site and the clients. That re­verse proxy then us­es a CDN to serve you the pages from a con­ve­nient­ly lo­cat­ed server, and can re­write the HTM­L/JS/C­SS in some ways to make it faster/safer­/nicer.

It al­so sup­pos­ed­ly will pro­tect my site from dif­fer­ent kinds of at­tack (the on­ly one that could pos­si­bly af­fect me was DOS at­tack, but thanks any­way ;-)

Al­so, they of­fer a plat­form so apps can pro­vide ser­vices for me, like in­trud­er de­tec­tion, an­a­lyt­ic­s, and oth­er­s, which is a very cool idea.

So, I cre­at­ed an ac­count at cloud­flare.­com and con­fig­ured it so that //ralsi­na.me (which is this ex­act same site ex­cept for wrong com­ment counts) is served via cloud­flare, and ralsi­na.me is served di­rect­ly.

What I've seen so far:

• Set­up is very sim­­ple

• It work­s, even set­t­ing up ex­per­i­­men­­tal fea­­tures

• It does seem very slight­­ly faster, but that's not a sur­prise since the tiny serv­er the site runs on has good conec­­tiv­i­­ty and am­­ple un­used re­­sources.

• It does do a good job of au­­to­­mat­i­­cal­­ly op­ti­miz­ing some things in ways that are gen­er­al­­ly ac­­cep­t­ed as a good idea (in oth­­er word­s, my ping­­dom and YS­low num­bers moved up)

So: no pain, maybe some gain. I will prob­a­bly move all sites in­to it tonight.