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Hi Ian These are all good suggestions. Accidentally (SSL excluded) these are all covered by modern CDNs, which do much more than just proxy. Memory vs. disk caching: Memory is faster CDNs will cache from memory by providing free/low-cost access to very large pool of resource, which most website owners couldn't utilize otherwise. (each proxy location will have ~10 high-powered servers that allocate memory for caching) Server configuration: Is your database on the same server as your web server? That's a problem, if true. This is a core CDN capability. The cached web content is served from proxy while database complies in the background and serves the rest of the materials. Database caching: Is your e-commerce system using it? The first hit on the database is a huge hit on performance. This is a great suggestion and - unlike other points - this is not a default CDN feature. However, this problem can be solved by intelligent caching heuristic. What I mean is that by monitoring resource usage over large pool of visitors an intelligent CDN system can identify dynamically generated objects which are not often changed, yet still un-cached due to their dynamic "origin". Pinpointing such objects and caching them in the way that ensures personalization and freshness will reduce the impact of database processing. For example, typical e-commerce site and will dynamically generate the product list from DB when in fact most products specifics (the image, the text, the pricing, etc) will not change over the product life-cycle. For all states and purposes these are static resources, yet they are being generated dynamically, for the lack of the better option... If you CDN can identify such instances and move in to cache these parameters, you will benefit from 30-50% improvement, on top of the usual 30-40% CDN factor. What I`m describing here is not future-tech but a patent-pending algorithms which are already used by the industry. You can find out more here:http://www.incapsula.com/the-incapsula-blog/item/414-advanced-caching-dynamic-through-learning