Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare
If your website is well-coded and administered, does CloudFlare offer any performance benefit?  (leaving aside security for now)<p>If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it.  But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap.<p>If a page is dynamic, then how can CloudFlare really speed it up?  You don't want them serving stale pages to users.  So it has to hit your server every time, in which case the user might as well hit your server.  In that case, I don't really see how CloudFlare improves things.<p>Am I misunderstanding how CloudFlare works?  It seems like if you follow typical performance tips like [1] then most of CloudFlare's benefit is eliminated.<p>I guess [1] does tell you to use a CDN.  You can save end user network latency for cached static pages, since they cache them in multiple geographic locations.  But if you have a simple site with 1 .js and 1 .css file per page, and compress and minify everything, I wonder if it's worth it.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529309" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529309</a>