I’ve been a CloudFlare user for years and I’m grateful for the free plan CloudFlare offered to personal websites. Also domain names are cheaper at CloudFlare.

Nothing to complain if it’s a free service. But this blog was slow as a matter of fact – it took usually a few seconds to have a response on screen. I understood I host my stuff in my garage Kubernetes lab and that can’t be as fast as something hosted in a datacenter.

However one day there was some electrician working at my place so everything’s turned down including my lab and broadband. Obviously my blog was down at that time and that’s expected. What’s unexpected is, from the looks of CloudFlare’s 504 page, my website was actually routed through CloudFlare’s node in Singapore. That would explain something, it would add a few seconds if the request needs to go to Singapore first, received by my home lab at Melbourne, response back to Singapore then to my phone in Melbourne, wouldn’t it?

I tried to find some settings in CloudFlare so my website could be routed by a node in Melbourne or Sydney for visitors in Melbourne, but I didn’t see there’s a setting for that. Turns out that it’s more of an ISP issue since I’m on Optus network. Again, it’s a free plan so it’s fine.

Until one day my colleague introduced Peakhour to me, an Australian business specialised in CDN, bot protection, etc. for websites. There’s free trial so I decided to give it a go. The setup was very easy, took me a few minutes to put in my domain name and the origin IP for my domain.

I saved some test results from webpagetest.org before and after I switched the DNS over. The improvement was greater than I expected! Later in the day, I installed the Peakhour plugin for WordPress and did another test, and was shocked again by the improvement!

After I expressed my interest to stay with Peakhour, Daniel at Peakhour responded:

Peakhour is happy to offer a free tier service to your personal blog(and to any developer/sys-admin’s too), to have a play. And there’s email/chat support even if you’re on free tier.

Wasn’t that awesome? 🙂