A Content Delivery Network, or CDN, is a powerful way to dramatically improve the performance of your website while still keeping costs manageable. Not too long ago CDNs were only practical for really big websites that were getting massive amounts of traffic.
But the technical and price barriers are dropping to the point where even modest websites (like SuccessCREEations.com here) can benefit from a CDN.
What is a CDN?
Without getting too technical, most websites all of their web content is hosted on a single web server. Most websites today contain a mix of static and dynamic content.
Static content contains the parts of the site that don’t change very often, if at all. These are things like images, graphics, style sheets, java script, etc. Often these static files eat up the lion’s share of the bandwidth for the website because files like images tend to be much larger than dynamic content. That’s why lots of big images can slow a website down tremendously.
Dynamic content, on the other hand, changes a lot. Usually with database driven platforms such as WordPress this dynamic content is stored in a database and called out as needed by the various template files. The links to the static files are also contained in the database. But the files themselves are stored in folders on the internet.
With traditional web hosting this content is all stored and served to the website visitor from the same server box.
A Content Delivery Network (also called a Content Distribution Network – or just CDN) takes copies of the static content off of the main web host and distributes them to many regional servers around the world. Often these are called “edge” servers. Doing this accomplishes a couple of things.
CDN Advantages
First thing you’ll notice with a CDN is that your website will load more quickly, usually much more quickly. Not only are the bigger files located closer to your visitors, but there is a built in redundancy with the static content located closer to the end users around the world.
This takes the majority of the load of your main server so it can do it’s job even more efficiently, again increasing your site’s load speed.
Another benefit increases the capacity of your website so it can withstand much more traffic before running into load problems.
Often times bandwidth on CDNs is significantly less than with traditional hosting. Usually you just pay for the bandwidth you use and it’s at a much lower rate than with traditional hosting.
That means adding a CDN can be much more cost effective than upgrading your server to handle the load by itself.
Is Speed Important?
Yes. The speed of your website is increasingly important, even with more people having access to higher speed internet connections.
Not only are people growing less patient on the web and are more likely to click away from a slow loading web page than ever before, but Google has started taking load speed into account in their page search result rankings.
Bottom line, having a faster website will bring you more traffic, all else being equal. Using a CDN is good for SEO.
Setup
It is very easy to integrate a CDN with your self hosted WordPress site today. I have a couple sites using CDNs and the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache makes integration (relatively) easy.
On the WordPress side I just installed the plugin, activated it, and entered in my CDN info into the plugin. It took care of copying all the files over to the CDN automatically for me.
CDN Recommendation
I set up New Media Profit Path with Amazon S3 and their CloudFront CDN a while back. It works well.
But I found it a bit challenging to set up. While their instructions are thorough, they are not simple to understand. And event though their service is relatively inexpensive when compared to traditional web hosting, it turns out Amazon S3 combined with CloudFront is relatively expensive when compared with some other CDN services out there.
Over the weekend I set up my main site here at SuccessCREEations with another CDN service, MaxCDN. So far I am very impressed!
Their service is much easier to set up than Amazon’s. Rather than having 2 separate services (Amazon has S3 for storage & CloudFront for CDN – with them you need both) it’s just one service.
Once I opened my account with them I just created what they call a “pull zone” and followed their crystal clear, and very simple, step-by-step instructions for setting things up. Within about 10 minutes my site was all set and my static content was being served up by their CDN.
And the best part?
MaxCDN is less than 1/3 the cost of what I’m paying Amazon!
So it’s an easier to use service for much less money. That makes MaxCDN the obvious choice in my book.
So basically CDN’s feed information to such websites as blogs?
Justin, I guess the way to say it is that CDN’s copy static content from your main server out to multiple nodes around the world closer to your website visitors. As a result you save on bandwidth costs from your web host and your web pages are served up more quickly to each visitor.
Hi Chris,
If you’re looking for easy setups, lower costs, one company with an integrated suite of CDN and Site Acceleration Services and high performance (including optimization for both large and small objects, and acceleration of any type of content (standard HTTP or HTTPS, static/dynamic, short/long tail), I suggest you take a look at Cotendo.
Implement individual services or the entire Cotendo CDN and Site Acceleration suite in minutes, without any changes to your existing Web architecture. Simply feed your content directly through Cotendo’s deployment-ready system.
Because of attractive pricing, Cotendo is unlike the competition focussing on Mid-Sized companies. Nevertheless giants like Facebook, Cisco and Cisco also choose for Cotendo because of their unmatched performance.
Philip
Heya Philip! You mentioned their “attractive pricing” but their pricing structure is not listed on their website anywhere. Makes comparison shopping a bit of a challenge, don’t you think?
Hey Chris,
No I don’t think so. It’s just a matter of contacting sales and request a quote. I wouldn’t call that a challenge
Anyway, I routinely see my clients bid Cotendo along with Akamai. All of them mentioned there’s a large gap in pricing. Even Akamai alleges in its lawsuit Cotendo as a low-cost competitor, but it’s not. According to Lydia Leong (Gartner), Cotendo is trying to innovate and offer things that Akamai doesn’t have.
Again, if you want an exact comparison, you should contact sales http://www.cotendo.com/contact/
Best regards,
Philip
If price is really their competitive point then there should be no reason for them not to share their pricing on their website. But there is no pricing info on their website.
Most people would rather have some basis for comparison before they contact a sales person to get sold on a service. I’m just saying.
MaxCDN has their prices out there for all to see., and they are about half of those of Amazon CloudFront. So I’ll be sticking with MaxCDN.
I am using MAXCDN and is good. Does anybody know if MAXCDN caches the images loading from Database for example: /images/picture.php?id=49
Heya Alex! MaxCDN sure can do that. It depends on the software that is powering your website. If you are using WordPress, the W3 Total Cache plugin I mentioned can be set to automatically upload all of your static files including images to MaxCDN for caching. No problem.
Hi Chris, the website is bespoke solution, registered users will upload photos over standard http. There will be so many static photos loading from DB. I am still waiting for maxcdn advance support to help with the issue. your advise is much appreciated.
If you’re using a custom solution then unfortunately you’ll have to go back to the people who programmed it for you if MaxCDN support can’t sort it out for you.
That’s yet another reason why I like WordPress so much. With 32 million WordPress websites and counting there are lot of folks, us here at SuccessCREEations included, who can help you with it. However, with a custom platform you’re kind of stuck, unfortunately.