Webflow Hosting Performance in Canada

Hi there!

I hope you are doing well :slight_smile:

I’m currently working on a site that will be mainly targeting Canadians (as I am from Canada).

One of the reasons I chose Webflow was because of it using Amazon CloudFront and Fastly, as they both have servers located in three Canadian cities, with Amazon having two in Toronto alone. When people visit my site, would the site be served by one of the servers in Canada, and if yes from which provider (Amazon or Fastly)?

Thank you so much for the help!

Hi @nocodecreator,

Welcome to the community,

You can see this response by @webdev on this POST that goes deeper into the subject.

Let me know if this helps

Hey @Carlos_Ruiz_Del_Vizo,

Thank you so much for the quick response.

So just to confirm, when individuals in Canada view the site, they will be served with the closest Amazon CloudFront or Fastly server (whether that server is in Canada or in the US)?

Hi @nocodecreator ,

That’s the theory, but it will depend on the user.

Ahh okay, do you mind expanding on what you mean by it depending on the user?

Perhaps @webdev could provide more information as well.

I believe he is referring to the users network location.

Webflow points to Fastly as a source in addition to AWS on the hosting page but I believe that is misleading. Fastly servers are powering the NON SSL (proxy.webflow.com) CNAME IP’s and not those used for SSL connections (proxy-ssl.webflow.com) which show as AWS addresses.

There is a thread about this from 2018 by a staff member → See Which hosting plan uses fastly? - #3 by JSM

So I would say that only AWS is in play for the majority of sites. Who doesn’t publish SSL sites in 2021? Now on Webflow’s hosting page they show a AWS Cloudfront Logo. However the main IP’s used by proxy-ssl.webflow.com are not Cloudfront IP’s , they are AWS IP’s . The asset CDN (assets.website-files.com) is a Cloudfront origin so all the site assets are being served by AWS Cloudfront.

For you in Canada, that would indicate that your users (local to CA) should be served by AWS Virginia but my test through Montreal showed 5 hops to AWS edge routers which is short. I would assume similar results in Toronto. My DNS is poisoned so It would be interesting for you to tell me what IP addresses you get back from a dig on proxy-ssl.webflow.com.
There are two Cloudfront edge locations (Toronto, ON; Vancouver, BC :wink: so assets should be served quick. Also important to remember that it is in the interest of just about every ISP to have a private peering relationship with AWS where possible. Offloads a bulk of their traffic.

That’s the best I can do on short notice.

Hey @webdev!

Thank you so much for responding.

I certainly agree that is incredibly misleading as they imply you will reap the benefits of both Fastly and Cloudfront. I did see that thread from 2018 earlier, but I figured by now they would have changed something or made an improvement haha.

I feel like I may be doing something wrong here. The load time for my site is currently up to four seconds on desktop and up to seven seconds on mobile devices, on some occasions the load time was double that on both desktop and mobile devices. Now admittedly, this is my first Webflow site but I have never created a site on WordPress with a load time higher than one second, and I decided to go with Webflow for this site because of it being advertised as a high performing platform. At least with WordPress hosting providers, you are able to choose a server location plus use the Fastly CDN.

I’m sure you would agree that load time is rather significant, I myself have gave up a few times trying to view the website (and its my site!).

That being said, I did quite literally buy the template for the site today so I do need to still optimize everything. However, I am fairly confident that the site is not being served from a server in Canada or even at least a server in a state that borders Canada.

Also, on virtually every tool/test, I got a warning about this file and it blocking the page loading. Ironically its a Webflow file, I say ironically because I assumed any CSS and JS files by them would be fine-tuned well haha.

https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/600756b626a98e4eaa915fe6/css/sportgigs.webflow.be84a14b9.min.css

My site URL is https://www.sportgigs.ca. Is there any way you could have a quick look?