It’s true that Cloudflare could improve global download performance, but it’s not quite as simple as signing up.
Stardock’s delivery system is tied into account verification, licensing, and legacy infrastructure that’s been around for years.
Switching to a CDN like Cloudflare isn’t just a one-click change — it would require reworking large parts of that backend to handle authentication and download integrity properly.
I’m sure they’re aware of the issue, but rolling out something that affects thousands of customers takes careful planning.
Just my two cents (or less).
Thank you,
Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant
But the download itself is no different than a download performed by someone else. The file hashes are the same no matter if you download it under one account from somewhere in England versus someone who downloaded it from somewhere in the US.
With that being said, static files such as simple installation/setup files should be able to be downloaded quickly and, of course, be cached globally with the likes of Cloudflare.
Obviously, those setup files can and probably do "phone home" to Stardock for authentication and license checking but that's an easy thing to do and probably only requires a few kilobytes at most. That, obviously, can't be done with Cloudflare but that would be easy to handle—you just have the API call be done with a server that's not behind Cloudflare.
