We're not on cloudflare, but the unsatisfactory performance doesn't really have to do with latency on the side of the person accessing the website. I tried an algorithm that went to all the sources for posts again to re-make thumbnails, which just takes too long because it's too connections to too many different downstream servers. This was to be a quick fix even if it's a little discourteous to the sites that hold the images we make into thumbnails as we lose thumbnails possibly a few times a day.

My choices now are either to make an image view that populates itself with the image once the thumbnail is downloaded from the site the post links to using some sort of eventing mechanism, or just do it the right way and cache the images ourselves somewhere. I assess both to take an equal amount of time so I'm going to do it the right way :P

As for latency issues if we use b2... from what I can tell they used to be just backup stuff and are now trying to compete with s3-alikes so maybe they're doing better on that front these days. I'm willing to take the risk considering the savings that could be made.