A CDN for small teams

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Most advice about a CDN assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to keep

Distance to the server is real latency. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

The practical version

Static sites benefit almost for free. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

How to tell if yours is fine

Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. Three things worth confirming about a CDN before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Static sites benefit almost for free — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.