Is Cloudflare’s Argo Smart Routing Worth The Cost?

Recently Cloudflare announced the addition of their new Argo Smart Routing service.

According to their website, Argo Smart Routing reduces Internet latency on average by 35%; connection errors by 27%. 

Cloudflare routes 10% of all HTTP/HTTPS Internet traffic providing Argo with real-time intelligence on the true speed of network paths. Argo’s smart routing algorithm uses this information to route traffic across the fastest paths available, and maintains open, secure connections to eliminate latency imposed by connection setup. Argo’s tiered caching technology uses regional tier 1 Cloudflare data centers to propagate content to Cloudflare’s global network of 115+ PoPs, minimizing requests to servers and reducing costs.

I hate slow loading websites

There is nothing worse than a slow loading website.  As I type this post, I tried linking to a Cloudflare press release and quickly exited (not on Cloudfare’s website) as it didn’t load in a couple of seconds.

I lived through the 1990s and created my first business on a slow dial-up 56K modem.  When cable Internet arrived in my home town in the early 2000s, I felt like the weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders.

In 2017, especially with the rise of mobile devices, there is no room for a slow-loading website.  You’ll lose visitors and this includes customers!

We developed Name Hero for speed

Behind our customer service, customers love the speed of our Name Hero infrastructure.  That’s why we’ll never be the “cheapest web host.”

We don’t use traditional”old school” dedicated servers.  Instead we’ve build our entire infrastructure on top of our private cloud only using Solid State Drives protected by Raid 10, LiteSpeed web server, MariaDB, and also fully integrated with Cloudflare including their Railgun (a $200/mo value alone).

Along with these speed optimizations, I was curious as to how well Argo would help Name Hero, so I decided to enable it on our main website:

As you can see, it made a noticeable difference!  If I can increase our page speed by just a couple of milliseconds, I’ll do it to provide a better user experience.

How to enable Argo

Enabling Argo is extremely easy.  There isn’t any coding or back-end work, you just have to login to your account on Cloudflare.com -> Click on Traffic -> Enable Argo:

How much does Argo cost?

Unfortunately Argo is not free.  Even with Name Hero being one of Cloudflare’s partners they still won’t allow us to offer this for free to our customers.

They bill you $0.10 for every gigabyte of transfer:

The average website would be around $5/month with larger ones going from there.

Cloudflare Argo Review

Personally, I think it’s worth the cost as I’m a speed and optimization nut.  Scroll through our Name Hero website and you’ll see what I mean.  Speed like that doesn’t happen on accident ;).

Feel free to share your experience with Argo and let us know if it improved your load times!

Ryan Gray

Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.