How to Improve Speed & Security of a Porn Website Using a CDN
A CDN sits between your visitors and your server. It caches pages and files close to visitors, hides your server’s IP, absorbs bots and DDoS attacks, and gives you free TLS. For an adult site it’s close to mandatory. Here is how to set one up without the side effects that bit us.
Basic setup (Cloudflare example)
- Add the domain to Cloudflare and change the nameservers at your registrar.
- Delete any parking records your registrar created (they point to the registrar’s parking page).
- Create A records for the root and www pointing to your server, with the proxy (orange cloud) on.
- Create a free Origin CA certificate (valid up to 15 years), install it on your server, and set SSL mode to Full (strict).
- Turn on “Always use HTTPS” and redirect www to the root (or the other way round) on the server.
Cache the right things
- Static files (CSS, JS, images, fonts): cache long. When you change one, give it a new file name; otherwise browsers and the CDN keep serving the old one.
- Pages: cache HTML on your own server too (a page cache like nginx fastcgi_cache or a WordPress cache plugin). Purge it when content changes.
- Video: if you self-host, serve HLS segments or MP4 from a media CDN priced per GB, and check that its terms allow adult content.
Browser Cache TTL overrides your server. Cloudflare’s Browser Cache TTL setting replaces the Cache-Control header your server sends. We spent hours wondering why a fixed stylesheet stayed broken: the CDN told browsers to keep the old one for 4 hours. New file names solve it permanently.
Security without blocking search engines
- Bot protection can block Googlebot. Cloudflare’s Bot Fight Mode returned 403 to real search engine crawlers on one of our sites. After any security change, fetch pages with a crawler user agent through the CDN and check Search Console’s crawl stats.
- Don’t block AI or other crawlers by default unless you have a reason. Protect the server with caching and rate limits instead of refusals.
- Rate-limit login pages and search, which bots hammer.
- Keep the origin IP secret: don’t send email from the web server’s IP and don’t leak it in DNS records.
Measure
Check response times as a crawler sees them, not only in your browser. Yandex flags sites with slow average response times. Watch your server’s response time for bot requests, and the CDN’s cache hit rate. A page that answers in 50 ms from cache and 3 seconds uncached is a slow page for most crawlers.
Common mistakes
- SSL mode “Flexible”: the CDN talks to your server over plain HTTP, which can cause redirect loops and leaks.
- Email obfuscation rewriting mailto links on contact pages.
- Caching pages that differ per visitor (logged-in pages, language versions) without varying the cache key.
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