In 2009, a company in South Africa proved a homing pigeon was faster than an ADSL connection, flying a 4 GB USB flash drive to prove it.
Besides IEEE's speculative work, nobody's actually re-run the 'bird vs. Internet' race in over a decade.
Now that I have gigabit fiber, I thought I'd give it a try.
I published a video with all the details—and even more background on the graceful birds used in the experiment—over on my YouTube channel:
In a prior post on the constraints of in-home website hosting, I mentioned one of the major hurdles to serving content quickly and reliably over a home Internet connection is the bandwidth you get from your ISP. I also mentioned one way to mitigate the risk of DoSing your own home Internet is to use a CDN and host images externally.
At this point, I have both of those things set up for www.pidramble.com (a Drupal 8 site hosted on a cluster of Raspberry Pis in my basement!), and I wanted to outline how I set up Drupal 8 and CloudFlare so almost all requests to www.pidramble.com are served through CloudFlare directly to the end user!
Before anything else, you need a CloudFlare account; the free plan offers the minimal necessary features (though you should consider upgrading to a better plan if you have anything beyond the simplest use cases in mind!). Visit the CloudFlare Plans page and sign up for a Free account.
I run dozens of websites, and help build and maintain many others. Almost every one of these sites is served on a server in one of the giant regional data centers in New York, Atlanta, Seattle, LA, Dallas, Chicago, and other major cities in the US and around the world.
These data centers all share some very important traits that are key to hosting high-performing, highly-available websites:
When I choose to host the Raspberry Pi Dramble website in my basement, I get almost none of these things. Instead: