What are Cloudflare, Maxcdn, Googleapis etc?

[Pawnless Endgame]

I wasn't sure whether to post under Software section (Windows) or in the Networks section.

Multiple web browsers here, but I've noticed over the last 1-2 years that a web page sometimes takes longer to load because the status bar says "waiting for cloudflare.com". The other 2 main offenders are ajax.googleapis.com and maxcdn.bootstrap.com. Sometimes it says "waiting for Facebook" even though I'm nowhere near FB.

I do have a VPN but it happens when it's turned off too and without using any custom DNS settings.

Just wondered what these sites are and are there any workarounds? E.g. I connect to the OcUK forums here and it says waiting for ajax.googleapis.com for up to 10 seconds then it loads forums.overclockers.co.uk which is where I'm meant to be. So is it possible to skip the middle man?

Also, is it possible to allow Facebook usage as a primary site but block it as a secondary site? I.e. I'm somewhere else and it's requesting data from FB off-site.

 

[Throrik]

Cloudflare/MaxCDN are Content Delivery Networks, they basically protect websites from slow downs, DDOS attacks, reduce costs and increase redundancy etc. A lot of the big websites use them. CloudFlare are probably the biggest and most popular one.

As for GoogleAPIs - I assume this is using Google's API Platform which again a lot of developers will use for various reasons. I can imagine one being their integration with Google Maps, or maybe even a contact form linking in with gMail etc. There's nothing nefarious about these. Your example ajex.googleapis.com is loading the Asychronous aspect of OcUK, I imagine it's used for refreshing/reloading without actually refreshing/reloading on the client side - a little bit difficult to explain if you're not a developer I guess.