What are the pros and cons in hosting a font on typekit vs self hosted

Question

I'm doing a new site for which I actually have licensed/free fonts for use as @font-face web fonts.

My question is this: as these fonts are also on TypeKit.com, do I actually gain anything from either using them from there vs hosting the fonts myself?

My site will run through CloudFlare and therefore the font files will be cached there as well.

Is there any reason why I should continue to use TypeKit for this particular site?

Best regards, Michael

Answer 1

There are performance, cost and stability trade-offs when choosing where to host your font files. Font files can make up a large portion of a page filesize and load time. Ideally, you should use a CDN (content delivery network) to speed up load times by serving the files from locations distributed around the world. Both CloudFlare and TypeKit use a CDN. If you host the font files themselves, you can put CloudFlare in front of your server to cache and deliver the files. The really nice thing about CloudFlare is that they don't charge based on pageviews/bandwidth (TypeKit charges by views). If your site suddenly becomes hugely popular, you won't get a huge bill from CloudFlare, while you would with TypeKit. Additionally, all providers have outages every now and then. Some networks have more robust setups than others. I personally respect CloudFlare because they always are extremely upfront about issues and post detailed post-mortems right away.

On another note: CloudFlare usually doesn't cache external resources (such as fonts served by TypeKit) on webpages. Files are only cached if they are originally from a server that's behind CloudFlare.