I ran dozens of sites, some with significant traffic, off of 3 servers for years: a DB server, a web app server, and a server running Nginx and Varnish. All in a single data center.
Tuning the cache was a way better use of my time than trying to place copies in data centers overseas. A site has to be pretty darn fast to see a significant improvement from geographic dispersal alone. Most of the value people get from Cloudflare or Fastly is the caching, not geography.
But the downside of DIY is you have to do it yourself, including Linux sysadmin. Which is one reason we don’t do it that way anymore.
I wish anycast was easier to use without owning your own set of ips. I've done something similar to the author, and ended up also relying on another provider for geo dns.
If I could have my own anycast ip to share on all my servers, that'd be really cool.
You don’t even need regional servers to do this.
I ran dozens of sites, some with significant traffic, off of 3 servers for years: a DB server, a web app server, and a server running Nginx and Varnish. All in a single data center.
Tuning the cache was a way better use of my time than trying to place copies in data centers overseas. A site has to be pretty darn fast to see a significant improvement from geographic dispersal alone. Most of the value people get from Cloudflare or Fastly is the caching, not geography.
But the downside of DIY is you have to do it yourself, including Linux sysadmin. Which is one reason we don’t do it that way anymore.
I wonder if in the future the author will investigate Anycast. This is the big feature that competes with the big CDN.
I wish anycast was easier to use without owning your own set of ips. I've done something similar to the author, and ended up also relying on another provider for geo dns.
If I could have my own anycast ip to share on all my servers, that'd be really cool.