Do you have a website or a blog and feel that it is getting bogged down with heavy traffic? First of all, congratulations — it is one of those problems that webmasters and bloggers would love to have. But how would you solve it? The first thing to do is to enable PHP acceleration, if your site/blog is PHP based. Although it should be straightforward (in theory), it might take a while to get it right. You know what they say — In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. Acceleration, however, is a low-hanging fruit, and will go a long way in solving your problems.
Once you have extracted all the mileage out of the accelerator solution, it is time to incorporate a Content Delivery Network or CDN. What a CDN does is to serve all your static files (images, style sheets, javascript files, and even cached blog pages) from a network of servers other than your own. These servers are strategically placed around the continent (and around the globe) so that your readers receive the content from a location geographically close to him. In addition to reducing the latency due to distance, CDN also helps you by reducing the load on your server.
If you have the technical know-how and time to spare, you can actually do it the hard way, by defining a distribution, origin source and setting up the DNS records pointing to something like Amazon CloudFront. If it sounds like too daunting a task, go with the right provider who will make it both cheap and easy. The daunting solution will work best for those who consider themselves semi-hackers or developers. The easier option is to take up something like MaxCDN. They provide round the clock expert support as well as faster service in continental US. They can also work out to be cheaper at the right volume. [See the comparison]
Regardless of which route you decide to take, a CDN works by “pulling” the static files from the specified location, caching them across the globe, and serving your readers from the closest location. When you choose a CDN provider, you have to compare features and cost. For instance, if you are a developer, it may become important to you to be able to refresh (“invalidate”) the cache on demand, which is quite a bit easier (and cheaper) on MaxCDN compared to CloudFront. Also of interest is the fact that MaxCDN gives you detailed statistics about your CDN usage.
In short, if you are a professional blogger and webmaster, consider MaxCDN as your content delivery solution. It will significantly improve the performance of your popular sites, and enhance end user experience.
Note that the links to MaxCDN on this post are affiliate links.
Photo by Yordie Sands 