Moderator
James Huff
(@macmanx)
Volunteer Moderator
Photon is a free image CDN, so if you’re happy with it, there’s no need to switch. If you aren’t happy with it, of course you should disable it and use something else. 🙂
http://jetpack.me/support/photon/
Cloudflare does give you a CDN for free, but I have found it to be slower than most CDNs, unless you pay for Cloudflare Pro at $20/month.
https://www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn
DreamSpeed is a fine CDN, but it’s priced at 12-cents/GB. So, you’ll have more control, and much more simplified billing than CloudFlare, but you probably won’t know without looking at your bandwidth stats whether 12-cents/GB is going to be the cheapest option, or if $20/month is.
https://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/cdn/
P.S. DreamSpeed and DreamPress are two very different things. 😉
“Cloudflare does give you a CDN for free, but I have found it to be slower than most CDNs, unless you pay for Cloudflare Pro at $20/month.”
The performance of the CDN actually doesn’t depend on the pricing plan (the basic CDN offered is the same for all customers). Paid plans do have more advanced optimization and security features, however, so that would really be the difference for speed (image optimization & the Web Application Firewall are the key differences).
Moderator
James Huff
(@macmanx)
Volunteer Moderator
Interesting, I was going by https://www.cloudflare.com/plans where free is “Fast site performance” and $20/month is “Faster site performance.”
Must have been a placebo effect or the image optimization for me.
Thanks for clarifying!
“Interesting, I was going by https://www.cloudflare.com/plans where free is “Fast site performance” and $20/month is “Faster site performance.””
Understandable 🙂 No worries.
Thanks all for your answers.
Currently Dreamspeed is offering 1 GB free if Google authenticator is enabled. I am compressing images with WP-Smush and the combination of WP-Smush and Dreamspeed has actually improved my performance by almost 8 points in Google Insights performance tool
