QUIC.cloud CDN on LiteSpeed: Full Guide, Features & Setup

If you’re using WordPress for your website and want to look at ways to optimize delivery speeds for regional users in Singapore & Asia, then you should consider using QUIC.cloud. In this article, we break down all the relevant information for you to better understand the QUIC.cloud CDN, its features, pricing, performance, and how to get started.

First, let’s quickly explain what a CDN is. A CDN, also known as a Content Delivery Network, is a vast, interconnected network of nodes and servers placed at various geographical locations globally.

The aim? Each node serves as a doorway and storage space, offering a quick access and retrieval point. This allows users who want to view your website to easily fetch a cached copy locally, instead of their data request having to travel all the way to your origin server (in Singapore, for example).

When your website uses a CDN, a copy of your site’s static files is stored at each geographic node. This allows visitor devices to quickly retrieve and view your pages from the closest country, making the overall browsing experience significantly faster.

Beyond speed, CDNs also offer major secondary benefits. These include advanced firewalls for threat mitigation, bot management, and rate-limiting, as well as fast DNS management services and automatic image optimization for smaller file sizes and better delivery.

For much more detailed information on how a CDN works, check out our article here.

What Is QUIC.cloud?

QUIC.cloud is a combined CDN and online services platform built by LiteSpeed Technologies, a US-based company from New Jersey that specializes in web hosting and content delivery. QUIC.cloud’s competitive edge is that it allows for the caching of both static and dynamic content (more on that later).

In reality, QUIC.cloud is just one of their many offerings. Their full ecosystem includes LiteSpeed Web Servers, load balancing solutions, and optimization plugins for major web platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and OpenCart.

It is important to note that QUIC.cloud itself splits its features into two separate groups: the CDN service and Online Services. If you only want to use QUIC.cloud’s Online Services such as image optimization and page optimization, you can do so without routing your entire website traffic through their CDN.

While QUIC.cloud officially launched in 2020, LiteSpeed Technologies has been around since 2002. For over two decades, they have focused on solutions designed to optimize existing web hosting hardware for maximum performance.

LiteSpeed Cache & QUIC.cloud

When discussing LiteSpeed and QUIC.cloud, it is important to understand that “LiteSpeed” can refer to two distinct things: the LiteSpeed Web Server itself and the LiteSpeed Cache plugin.

The LiteSpeed Server is a high-performance web server software suite that powers your web hosting environment. While it is highly recommended for maximum performance, it is actually not a strict requirement for using the QUIC.cloud CDN.

On the other hand, LiteSpeed Cache is a dedicated optimization plugin designed to work with Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, and Magento. This specific LiteSpeed Cache plugin is what is required to connect your site to QUIC.cloud CDN and its Online Services.

Here are the main features of the QUIC.cloud CDN:

1. Image Optimization

As part of its Online Services suite, QUIC.cloud automatically converts your website images into newer, lightweight formats like WebP and AVIF. This compresses the total file size of your web pages for faster delivery to your readers, all while preserving visual quality.

While QUIC.cloud does require processing time to convert these images, you can easily automate the workflow using server cron jobs. Once configured through your LiteSpeed Cache plugin settings, you can simply upload your images normally and let the system handle the rest of the conversion process in the background. Very easy to set up.

2. Page Optimization

Web pages are made up of several code elements, primarily HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Page optimization allows you to minify, compress, and configure these files to ensure much more efficient page loading speeds.

For example, you can “minify” code elements to shrink their total file size before delivery. This process strips away unnecessary spaces, comments, and line breaks from the files. Code generated by website builders and developers often contains a lot of this code bloat, which browsers do not actually need to render your site.

For more advanced users, you can also combine internal, external, and inline CSS, or defer non-essential JavaScript. This ensures that the structural parts of your page load first, directly improving your real-world load times. All of this can be managed inside the LiteSpeed Cache plugin admin panel.

3. Dynamic Content Caching

The powerful combination of the LiteSpeed Cache plugin and the QUIC.cloud CDN allows for highly accurate, predictive dynamic caching. This enables the CDN to capture and store your website’s dynamic pages, keeping them ready for instant delivery the moment a visitor requests them.

Unlike most traditional CDNs that only support static content like images and stylesheets, QUIC.cloud is built to cache dynamic content. Normally, dynamic pages require complex database queries and PHP scripts, which drain heavy server resources every time a page loads.

This capability is particularly useful for database-heavy websites, dynamic HTML templates, and eCommerce applications. By storing this dynamic content directly at the CDN’s Point of Presence (PoP), you gain two advantages: your readers enjoy shorter wait times, and your origin server stays lightweight because QUIC.cloud handles the heavy lifting of processing and compiling the page layout.

4. 78 PoPs Across 8 Regions

QUIC.cloud CDN features a global footprint of 78 Points of Presence (PoPs) distributed across 8 main regions. These individual nodes store and disseminate a cached copy of your website to users from the closest available server location.

While a network of 78 PoPs is smaller than networks like Cloudflare (which boasts 300+) or Bunny CDN (with 119+ PoPs), it is strategically placed to cover major cities in Asia alongside key traffic locations around the globe.

5. Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Alongside its speed optimizations, QUIC.cloud includes a robust Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect your website against an array of cyber threats. Security features include rate limiting to prevent brute-force attacks on your login pages, Layer 7 (Application Layer) DDoS protection, IP and country-level blacklisting or whitelisting, and hotlinking prevention to keep other sites from stealing your bandwidth.

While the built-in WAF may not be quite as comprehensive as Cloudflare’s, missing advanced options like granular custom security rules or a dedicated “Bot Fight Mode”, QUIC.cloud’s firewall provides reliable, high-performing security functions that meet the needs of most small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs).

6. Native HTTP/3 Support

Finally, QUIC.cloud supports the HTTP/3 protocol across its entire CDN network, which is the latest and fastest version of the web communication protocol. While your daily visitors won’t notice this on the frontend, on the backend, it delivers a much higher level of data transmission flexibility and stability when sending web packets over fluctuating mobile networks.

QUIC.cloud Asia & Oceania PoPs

Below are the current Points of Presence (PoPs) across the Asia and Oceania regions. For small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) operating out of Singapore and across Asia, this dense regional coverage is more than adequate to ensure lightning-fast page delivery.

QUIC.cloud Costs & Pricing

Below is a breakdown of QUIC.cloud’s pricing model. They charge based on a usage model, meaning you only pay for the bandwidth your visitors consume on the CDN.

For a standard SME website in Singapore drawing roughly 3,000 to 5,000 page views monthly, you can expect your costs to run around $4.00 to $10.00 SGD per month for the CDN service. Note that your final usage-based costs vary depending on how asset-heavy your web pages are, such as whether you host uncompressed images, large documents, or video elements.

Under the Standard Plan, bandwidth regularly costs between 2 cents and 8 cents per GB in USD, depending on the region.

QUIC.cloud DNS

QUIC.cloud also includes a built-in DNS management service, which you can access from your QUIC.cloud dashboard. During your initial setup, the system automatically scans and reads your current DNS records for a seamless transfer. Once your domain is successfully connected to the CDN, this dashboard serves as your main DNS management panel moving forward.

In this section, we will walk you through exactly how to set up the QUIC.cloud CDN on a WordPress website. If you happen to be using a different CMS platform, feel free to drop us an email so our team can assist you.

Before starting, make sure you have administrator access to your WordPress dashboard and that you have already installed and activated the LiteSpeed Cache plugin.

1. Enable Online Services

Log into your WordPress admin panel and navigate to LiteSpeed Cache > General. Go to the Online Services tab and click on the “Enable Online Services” button. QUIC.cloud will spend a few seconds detecting your server type and IP address.

2. Create Your QUIC.cloud Account

For the next step, you will be prompted to create a QUIC.cloud account. Account creation is free and is required if you plan to use the CDN network service. (Note: If you only plan to use the online services like Image and Page Optimization, you may select the “remain anonymous” option instead).

3. Activate the CDN Option

After creating and linking your QUIC.cloud account, you should continue back into your settings and toggle on the Enable CDN option.

4. Choose Your Connection Method

Next, you will need to select how you wish to connect your website to the QUIC.cloud CDN. Let’s select the more straightforward and seamless option: Use QUIC.cloud DNS.

5. Verify Detected DNS Records

QUIC.cloud will take some time to read your existing DNS records for copying. Make sure to run a manual check yourself once the automated detection is complete, especially on your A records, CNAME records, and mail-handling MX records for your email. Feel free to reach out to us if you need any guidance here. Once you are ready, click the Add DNS Zone button.

6. Update Your Nameservers

Then, you will need to log into your domain registrar and change your existing nameservers to the ones provided by QUIC.cloud. Make sure you delete any other old nameservers that are not pointing directly to the QUIC.cloud CDN network.

7. Monitor DNS Propagation

Once changed, give the new nameservers and DNS records some time to propagate across the internet, which usually takes about 1 hour. You can use a free tool like DNSChecker to check if your new nameservers have successfully updated globally.

8. Verify Active CDN Routing

Lastly, visit check.lscache.io and input your domain name to see if the network is actively caching your site. You should see an x-qc-pop header in the results, which officially confirms that QUIC.cloud is serving your website!

That is it! QUIC.cloud CDN is now successfully enabled and optimizing your website traffic.

As a specialized web development agency in Singapore serving SMEs, we deploy LiteSpeed caching and QUIC.cloud CDN to boost website performance for our clients. In our experience, we found that QUIC.cloud is easy to manage, reliable, and budget-friendly for the comprehensive suite of features it offers.

When reviewing page load speeds and real-world metrics, QUIC.cloud delivers cached content well across Asia and Oceania regions. It achieves reliable Time to First Byte (TTFB) speeds well under 500ms, and frequently hits under 100ms within Singapore. Please note that TTFB and actual full page load speeds are different metrics; nonetheless, TTFB serves as a good benchmark.

While CDN performance is crucial, we also value QUIC.cloud’s built-in security features. The platform includes reliable brute-force attack protection and geolocation blocking (country blocking), which aids in boosting overall site security and handling unwanted bot traffic.

If there is room for future improvement, the addition of more specific, granular security rules and stronger automated bot management options would make QUIC.cloud CDN an even more outstanding option on the market.