Content Delivery Networks

I am starting to approach the monthly usage limit of 82 GB and wondering what is the best option for getting extra bandwidth. Most of my traffic is UK based and that is my customer base (with a small amount in Europe which will hopefully grow).

Option 1 - CDN free or paid
Option 2 - Open another DASP account and host my images and other static content there.
Option 3 - Just pay the extra $5 / GB , I don't think this makes economic sense but thought I would put it in for balance and completeness.

As I said my main issue is how to spread my traffic now that I am approaching my 82GB/month. But there are the other benefits such as faster load times now still relevant. In the past browsers could only do 2 simultaneous requests per domain but now its much higher. Firefox and IE8 can do 8.

The whole CDN thing seems risky and a little like hard work.

Interested to know what peoples thoughts are?

Many thanks,

Will

 

You might wanna check out Cloudflare, it's a relatively new cloud based CDN which could save you some bandwidth and potentially speed up site performance:

https://www.cloudflare.com/

There base plan is free with options to upgrade for more features.

 

Cloudflare is fairly easy to use too, because all you have to do is point your domain to their name servers, and they practically handle the rest. No real work has to be done on your end aside from that.

 

Thanks for the replies.

Yes I have been looking at Cloudflare.

I ran some speed comparisons for diff cdns ...

http://www.cloudclimate.com/cdn-speed-test/

What's good about this is that it does a global test and a local test for you. Cloudflare did not come out so well but Cloudfront CDN did 640ms vs 180ms.

At this point I am wondering if you get what you pay for.

That said I think I will try Cloudflare as I am a sucker for all the bells and whistles they have added.

 

That's a nice test site for cloud content.

Glad to hear you're going through Cloudflare. It's free, so it's probably worth a try in the least.

That being said, cloudfront is a very solid product which can probably scale better.

 

Will DASP block requests from Cloudflare?

I read in the knowledge base of Cloudflare that there is a risk of hosts blocking requests from Cloudflare and that I might need to whitelist Cloudflare.

Is this something that might happen with DASP?

Are there any other issues with cloudflare and the fact that they cache pages when in actual fact none of my pages are 100% static.

Will
PS thanks for the words of encouragement re Cloudflare... 5 mins setting up but a ton of stuff to read to check I am not missing anything.

 

No. We haven't run into any issues around CloudFlare.

 

Hi,

In the end I have moved to MaxCDN. They had some good reviews and came out well on this speed test, http://www.cloudclimate.com/cdn-speed-test/.

Cloudflare whilst it did what it said it would do. I just found the black box approach a little unnerving. Also I felt that there was no such thing as free and figured what ever Cloudflare did CDN wise MaxCDN would do better (its $39 less 25% with a voucher). Which is what the test results indicated from cloudclimate indicated.

I have had a few hickups due to Cloudflares ip address being treated as the website's IP address initially. MaxCDN automatically picks up the website IP address and my domain was still pointing at the Cloudflare servers when I configured the CDN.

MaxCDN support is pretty good and easy to access.

Things are now going OK but I kind of thought I would get bigger pick up in speed. Not sure I have seen much. But then I guess that shows how good DASP is serving up the static files.

But I have moved a ton of bandwidth off my DASP account which was the main purpose.

The trouble with all these gizmos that take 5 mins to set up. They sort of do but then the inner nerd wants to know how it works. So you read about a 100 posts on CDNs just to make sure you are on the inside track.

By the way these are some good articles on CDNs that go a little deeper than the usual cut and paste stuff you see on blogs -
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/static-cookieless-domain/
http://fragged.org/site-optimisations-cdn-and-the-hidden-bandwith-costs-of-cookies_1006.html
http://www.stoimen.com/blog/2010/03/12/use-cookie-free-domain-and-cdn-for-static-content/
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/08/a-few-speed-improvements/

So hopefully job done.

 

That sounds familiar.

For what you are trying to do - reduce bandwidth on your site/account here, a CDN is perfect. It will do that. The speed increases? I don't see many people jumping up and down over them.

We're talking about such tiny measurements these days, it's getting beyond anything you could even notice. 100ms? Okay, sure you can measure that, but it makes no difference to your eye or the experience of the site.