TESTED: CDN versus Normal Server - What Will Make You $$$? (20)
TESTED: CDN versus Normal Server - What Will Make You $$$?
Everyone's talking about CDNs - Content Delivery Networks - these days. Apparently they'll speed up your sites, make your content accessible all over the world and possibly make you a refreshing beverage while they're at it.
But how much do they REALLY help your landers compared to an old-fashioned single server?
Well, I've spent the last week or so putting together a really comprehensive test, with the aid of the lovely people at Beyond Hosting, so that you can find out for sure if you want a CDN or not for your campaigns.
What's a CDN and why might I care?
Location matters.
It matters when it comes to your web servers. Data might move quickly, but it's not instant. If someone clicks on your ad in Florida, and your web server happens to be on a server in Florida, it'll appear really quickly. If the person clicking is in Texas, it'll appear fairly quickly.
But if the person clicking is in Mumbai, then it will appear slowly. Slowly enough, in fact, that it'll do bad things to your conversion rates.
Content Delivery Networks are an attempt to solve that problem. They're a network of servers around the world which will take your static files - images, stylesheets, HTML - and ensure that it's as close as possible to whoever requests it.
In theory, they should massively speed up your landing pages, particularly if your server's on a different continent. But do they really have that much of an impact?
The Tests
I took a fresh new VPS1024 from Beyond Hosting, with LiteSpeed installed, and uploaded a simple landing page (actually the same one that I used for the landing page loading time test) to it. I then uploaded the same lander to the Beyond Hosting CDN.
(Incidentally, I'm very impressed at how easy their CDN is to use. It's literally just "navigate to CDN page, choose files to upload, copy link, done.")
I then "primed" the CDN with a stream of traffic from ZeroPark. That gets the content uploaded into the network and ready to go.
I then ran 4 tests on both the server and the CDN in quick succession, using the Uptrends worldwide speed testing tool, which downloads a single file from each server 112 times from different locations around the world. The Uptrends tool is a great way to get speeds from around the world - they test everything from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City to Amsterdam to Tokyo to Buenos Aires. I threw the first test's data away - more "priming" for both CDN and VPS - and saved the other 3 test results.
Finally, I collected all that information together (using a handy tool that I ended up writing - use it if you want to do your own speed tests on your server!) and took averages from both the US and the EU.
The Results
And so, here are the averages of total time taken to download the file for both the CDN and the VPS:
CDN, Europe: 0.125 Seconds
VPS, Europe: 0.410 Seconds
Winner: CDN by 0.285 Seconds
CDN, US: 0.191 Seconds
VPS, EU: 0.196 Seconds
Winner: CDN by 0.005 Seconds
Conclusions
If your main server is in the US and you're running campaigns in any EU countries:
Using a well-set-up CDN like Beyond's will definitely improve your landing page loading times. Probably to the point that it'll improve your clickthrough rate.
0.285 sec might not seem like very much, but bear in mind we're only loading a single file here - and that time is already enough to affect CTR. Even ignoring name server lookups, which will only happen once, the US VPS took around 3 times as long to deliver a single file to EU locations as the CDN. On a landing page with a few images and some Javascript, that will add up fast.
Of course, your tracking server will still be in the US, so you may not serve the landing page overall as fast as you would if you had a server in the EU - but it's a lot easier to upload your static files to a CDN than set up a second server elsewhere, and you can use a single CDN all across the EU.
If you're running campaigns in the mainland US, and your server's well set up and peered in the mainland US:
You probably won't see much significant improvement in speed by uploading your files to a CDN, at least at low volumes.
At higher volumes, it may be a different story - Tyler tells me that their CDN progressively moves files into faster storage as they're requested more. Having your files on a CDN will also significantly reduce the strain on your main server, which is very helpful for larger volumes, and may be worth considering for that reason alone. If anyone tests implementing CDN storage for high-volume campaigns in the US, please do let me know - I'd be fascinated to see your results.
I've attached the full spreadsheet of all data, in case you're interested to view it!
Thanks again to Tyler and Beyond Hosting for helping out with this benchmark!
And that's it! I hope that was helpful - if you have any questions or comments, please do add 'em below!
Testing the loading times from different countries was on my to-do list today. I think you read minds...
In doing some testing, I noticed something about load times. I created two test campaigns and had one link to a landing page, and another direct link to an offer in the EU (both through the tracking software). The times for landing page were in the 0.5 to 1.2 seconds, and the direct links were in the 2.5-4.0 seconds. I guess that's one more reason to use a landing page.
Nice work!
Hi caurmen,
Like to check.
e.g.
mylanderdomain.com/landers/
Let's say I have this lander with the necessary files.
index.php (let's say this file is 15kb)
image1.png (let's say this file is 60kb)
image2.png (let's say this file is 110kb)
image3.png (let's say this file is 70kb)
Note: I don't have separate css file. It is all stored inside index.php. I read somewhere in STM that it's better to have within the same file, instead of calling a separate css file.
Note: I don't have any JS file here, even I use jquery. I am using the google jquery server. If I do have custom js, I just add it directly into index.php (right before </body>)
Looking at this, I have only 3 images (example) for this lander.
What's the benefits of using CDN based on my scenarios above?
Will CDN actually help page loading?
Note: I assume if you have many images, css files, maybe CDN will work better.
Any help? Thanks.
It very much depends upon where your server is located and where your campaign is targeted.
If, say, you're running a US server and an EU campaign, then hosting your images on a CDN will noticably speed up the page loading time. Your index will still take a little while to load up, but the images will subsequently load up faster.
If your server's in the US and so is your target market, though, you're not likely to see much improvement.
Hey Caurmen when you say -"At higher volumes, it may be a different story"
How high are we talking until their CDN progressively moves files into faster storage? And with small volumes, will the files still move to faster storage space eventually?
I decided to try this since I'm running mobile but I haven't noticed any increase in speed. In fact it seems to be slower in comparison, even though I'm running camps outside of the US and my server is based in the US. It may be because I'm not running huge volume. Maybe less than 5000 clicks a day and they are spread across different geos and lps.
Just wondering if I'm better off not using a CDN? I have only put my images and CSS files on CDN and not JS files since I heard that this can sometimes not work properly.
What are your thoughts?
@kai1 - You'll need at least 10-20 hits a minute on many CDNs to really start seeing the benefit - so around 15k a day. Depends on the CDN - ask their support staff to get the most up-to-date info.
Depending on the geos you're working in, you may be better off acquiring a local (or local-ish) VPS. In LatAm, for example, even a Miami or Dallas-based VPS will give you noticably improved load times thanks to cable location.
Thanks Caurmen. Are you referring to the number of hits before the data is moved to a closer server to that geo, or do you mean that a CDN doesn't really help much unless you're doing big numbers?
If it's the latter, then perhaps a CDN isn't something I should really be worrying about at the moment, but then again, I'd like to be hitting those kind of numbers soon.
A CDN will help a bit in almost all cases, but yeah, you'll need to be pushing more than the minimum number of hits to each asset continuously to really see the speed-up.
How many hits, though, will depend on the individual CDN you're using - I'd definitely recommend asking their support staff what the minimum traffic you need to see assets transferred to closer servers is.
Nice post. I am planning on trying CDN as well, but to simplify things, I am going to simply create a secondary LP with the CDN links, and then split-test between the two and compare the overall ROI.
I will do this on my PPV traffic, so it will have the most impact.
Originally Posted by modulus
PPV ( and pops in general ) is the perfect traffic to test this since it puts quite some load on the server.
Okay guys, if I want to invest in a CDN, who should I go with? What prices are involved?
For simplicity of use, if you're targeting US or EU, I'd go with Beyond's CDN. It's very simple to use and prices are pretty affordable. I've heard good things about MaxCDN too, although I haven't tested it personally.
Hey Guy's
Just as a rule of thumb, how much bandwidth would you say you need from your CDN if your just starting out with one?
Beyond hosting is $15 for 50gb and Max CDn IS $9 FOR 100GB.
Now i'm a big fan of Beyond hosting as they service is awesome! But the price margin is quite significant if you think about what your getting.
The question here is...if your starting in mobile you may have a campaign look like this:
VPS: Beyond hosting (US based)
Offer: Free I phone 6
Payout: 4.80
Geo: South Africa
Lander: Pretty simple (Average lander)
Budget: $10 per campaign
Campaigns: 4
Average clicks for 1 day of data: 250-400
Would a 50gb bandwidth be enough to support this? If yes...How far could 50gb take you?
Just as a rough guess, dont expect exact figures.
Any one who can chime in I'm sure would help a few people out.
Cheers 
MaxCDN is awesome. The bandwidth you don't use rolls over to the next month. Easy to use and is always available. 100GB of bandwidth a month is more than enough you need.
Try them out for a month and if it doesn't work out you could always move to another. Rackspace is another but I haven't used them yet.
Thanks Kash50
Helps give a bit of perspective before diving in.
Sorry for bumping an old thread but my question is relevant so I thought asking here would be better than opening a new thread.
I am using prosper202 for all my tracking and I have about 300 sites which I manage using prosper for all SEO and paid traffic. I also have 2 other instances of prosper on same server where I run few native campaigns. Currently I am using beyond hosting's managed cloud service for prosper and this server also has about 50 of my sites. I think I need to move all prosper setupto a separate server but I am not sure what config do I need for this. There are few options on their page but I am not sure how much do I need. Can someone help me configure this new server please?
My usual response to something like this, from a tech side, would be "if it's not broke, don't fix it".
Why do you want to move from BH to a new server? Sounds like a complex setup that will take a while to untangle.
As for what sort of server you'll need - the raw traffic numbers will be the most important detail here. How many visitors per day and per hour will you need to handle?
In terms of Web hosting alone, if the sites are static sites rather than discussion-heavy WP sites or similar, you could probably save a lot by moving them all to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. I did that recently with a large number of sites and it's working out very well. You could also drop them all (again, if they're static) on a small VPS running Nginx, and then put them behind Cloudflare with aggressive page cache settings.
I have upgraded the current server to 8CPUs/12 GB ram and have got almost all my sites on cloudfare as well. They are all on wordpress. The static ones, I have configured with MaxCDN. So I think I am good as of now.
Originally Posted by stmfan
Thanks
Sounds like a solid setup, yep!
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