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[EchelonOne]

Cloud Flare - Takes Your Website to a Whole New Level in Speed and Security!
Average Speed increase 60-80% faster!

Today we enabled our IP.Board to start using our CDN for faster content delivery to our visitors, and also boosting security at the same time. Now, you can forget about using excessive bandwidth and server resources and concentrate on your content.

If you visited us before, then you will notice quite a large overall speed performance, on the site. All javascript, css and images are now being delivered at lightening speeds depending on your location. If our server fails at anytime, the CDN will still keep all cached data available to users until the server comes back online.

The advantages of using the CDN (Content Delivery Network) are really impressive, and also security is enhanced. Any bad IP's are now blocked by the CDN, this includes bots, spammers and attempted exploits - we can view all of the information on a daily basis from our CDN logs.

We have performed a few tests this evening, with and without the CDN enabled - one test was done on a FLV video file weighing in at around 20Mb, now our server uses a 100Mbit pipe and without the CDN enabled the video took roughly 7-10 seconds to download, when the CDN was re-enabled and the same file was called the time dropped to just about 2 seconds. There are many CDN's available and some are even mentioned on Invision Power Services such as MaxCDN, etc with special offers, however these work differently and require changes to be made to javascript, css and image paths.

The CDN we are using takes no more than a few minutes to setup, they state approximately 90 seconds to signup and go through the settings. You have to change your namservers for your domain to allow the CDN to function, this can take a few hours to propagate - but once done, it is godsend to any website. It will handle more than just a single domain on your account, if you wish to add more. You have full control over how the CDN behaves with your content. We did find that "Rocket Boost" tends to break IP.Boards dynamic menu system due to a javascript conflict, however everything else we tried seemed to be fine including minify HTML, etc. You can disable the CDN at anytime if you don't want to cache data while you are making alterations to your website, just enable it again after, or it will automatically enable itself after 3 hours. You can enter you Google Analytics ID if you wish, all your data is logged including any spammer IP's or IP's that have been known to try exploits on other websites - these are blocked before they even get chance to access your website.

We opted for the FREE service package, which gives you many features but your CDN stats are only updated every 24 hours, the Pro version was $20 per month and offered much more and updates at 15 minute intervals. Many forums are now using this CDN, I have not heard of many IP.Board forums yet, but I expect that will change once users start seeing the benefits of using this FREE service.

You have nothing to loose, and much to gain from a CDN - page speeds increase your rank placements in search engines like Google, etc - so, it is worth signing up and taking this new approach with your IP.Board.

Now, the link you need to signup and grab this amazing service! Remember, it is nothing but gain with this and very easy to deploy!

Signup Link: Cloud Flare | Security & Apps for Any Website
Echelon Designers is not affiliated with Cloud Flare in anyway - This post is from our own experiences of using this system, and we wish you all the best in using it on your own forums.