MaxCDN now sponsoring us.
I’m pleased to announce that the kind folks at MaxCDN – a CDN (content delivery network) are now sponsoring Webdistortion. They have agreed to offer us their service at no charge, which is great for you guys as the site should now be a good bit faster. We now join online monoliths such as Mashable.com, WebDesignerDepot.com, BuySellAds.com and CopyBlogger.com to mention just a few larger blogs using the service.
Setup is really easy- they simple mirror the static content on your blog (automagically), such as images, and css, install a WordPress plugin to change the URL’s, and away she goes. Incidently the plugin also offers caching and support for a number of other content delivery networks, as well as a couple of other speed benefits.
CDN’s help to speed up your site for a number of reasons. The main one is that the domain that your images come from, is different from your content – and as some browsers can only make a certain number of simultaneous web requests at once, this overcomes the problem. (Just a side note – this Firefox plugin is also work a look at to increase connections). They also do a good job at serving content from servers closer to the client request, with a network of machines across different countries, which also increases reliability. Thirdly, it takes the load off your existing host, and lowers your bandwidth consumption quite a bit.
I’ve talked briefly about this previously (see under lowering web requests). Sometimes you’ll see larger websites using subdomains to serve their static content for this very reason. MaxCDN also allow you to “mask” a subdomain of your own website to point to their hosting. Personally I haven’t bothered as yet doing so, as not many folks link directly to my images, and as such I’m not terribly concerned over my image paths not looking like this http://images.webdistortion.com/blah.jpg – as opposed to http://blogimg.maxcdn.com/blah.jpg – but the facility exists for this reason.
So – bit thanks to those guys, and if you are having bandwidth problems I highly recommend you check them out.
