Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Mobile

Using a CDN for Mobile Landingpages (13)

07-03-2013 03:43 PM #1 nusolutionz (Veteran Member)
Using a CDN for Mobile Landingpages

I'm working on a couple mobile landingpages right now and i'm thinking about using a CDN to increase the loading speed. But i'm not sure how well CDN's work with mobile traffic. What's your experience?

07-03-2013 04:57 PM #2 vidivo (Member)

Interested in this as well.. and im assuming your using rackspace right? i just signed up with them and trying to figure things out slowly..

07-03-2013 05:10 PM #3 bbrock32 (Administrator)

I suppose you want to decrease load speed not increase it right?

If that's the case a CDN helps if your campaign is targeting a country that is not as the server you are using for hosting.

Using a decent CDN will always yield faster loading times.

07-03-2013 06:40 PM #4 ThrvTrkr (Member)

Just make sure the CDN is a good one like Rackspace or Amazon Cloudfront, who have servers all over the world.

This won't speed up your redirects though, which IMO is equally important in loading speed, so if you're running campaigns in Australia with a server in Texas, you should just get a server overseas if you are running huge volume.

07-03-2013 07:35 PM #5 peteperclick (Member)

CDN n00b question here... but would you utilize a CDN just to offload images from your server or would you use the CDN to host the whole page?

07-03-2013 10:50 PM #6 zeno (Administrator)

Quote Originally Posted by peteperclick View Post
CDN n00b question here... but would you utilize a CDN just to offload images from your server or would you use the CDN to host the whole page?
CDNs only host static content, therefore cannot be used for pages that have server-side processing occurring each time someone visits. In other words, since virtually every webpage you use is going to have some sort of PHP (dynamic!) on it whether it be tracking or something else you can't put them on CDNs (or the code is processed once by the CDN and then becomes static).

07-04-2013 12:08 AM #7 vidivo (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by zeno View Post
CDNs only host static content, therefore cannot be used for pages that have server-side processing occurring each time someone visits. In other words, since virtually every webpage you use is going to have some sort of PHP (dynamic!) on it whether it be tracking or something else you can't put them on CDNs (or the code is processed once by the CDN and then becomes static).
Wait one sec.. you can put the prosper202 javascript for landing pages tag on it and still host the entire html on the CDN though right? As far as i know the javascript stays the same and just needs to collect the user subid that comes in?

07-04-2013 12:57 AM #8 zeno (Administrator)

Quote Originally Posted by vidivo View Post
Wait one sec.. you can put the prosper202 javascript for landing pages tag on it and still host the entire html on the CDN though right? As far as i know the javascript stays the same and just needs to collect the user subid that comes in?
Javascript is processed client-side (i.e. by the user's browser) thus will work fine when the file is hosted on a CDN.

07-04-2013 02:56 PM #9 ThrvTrkr (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by zeno View Post
CDNs only host static content, therefore cannot be used for pages that have server-side processing occurring each time someone visits. In other words, since virtually every webpage you use is going to have some sort of PHP (dynamic!) on it whether it be tracking or something else you can't put them on CDNs (or the code is processed once by the CDN and then becomes static).
Actually, Dave, don't mean to one up you or anything, but while it's true most CDNs only host static content, it is possible to host dynamic content at Amazon Cloudfront. You can actually deliver the whole site.

I didn't bring this up at first because it's more technical than the average CDN setup, and I don't understand the full power of it myself (I'd consider myself non-technical though). However, while I'm still researching this, I believe you can actually serve the whole site, INCLUDING all your redirects at the edge of the internet.

That basically means, say your server is located in the US, but you're running traffic in Australia. You may serve static content via CDN, but the redirects are going to be slow as hell. BUT with Amazon Cloudfront, your entire site is cached at their Cloudfront servers in Australia or SE Asia, or wherever is the closest to the traffic. So, it would be like if you had a server in Australia (or wherever your traffic is in the world).

This is insanely powerful if it works like I'm thinking. Someone should build a service on top of it to provide to marketers.

Check out this video where they go over whole site delivery with Cloudfront, if interested:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBsZ2UkxYbY

07-05-2013 12:25 AM #10 zeno (Administrator)

Oh right, yeah I didn't even think of that. Cheers. Didn't actually know CloudFront did that. Scaling out to the edge makes sense for both hosting and DNS (e.g. Route 53, DNS Made Easy), my only concern is that when you go toward that your hardware changes significantly, i.e. you might be using amazon boxes that are sub-par compared to e.g. a BeyondHosting VPS/Dedi, which may make tracking performance worse if you're using things like P202/CPVlab.

It would make A LOT of sense to have content out on the edges and have very simple tracking/redirects, where data is logged to some main server somewhere independent of redirection so users are bounced through as fast as possible. I've wondered if MobAffTracker uses something like this? I.e. cloud based + PoPs all over the place so international redirects are fast. Gets me tingling just thinking about it, useful to any form of AM ever used anywhere.

07-05-2013 10:33 AM #11 caurmen (Administrator)

Yeah, my experience with Amazon hardware is that it tends toward the pretty terrible, latency-wise. However, sounds like CloudFront would definitely be worth a test. I'll look into it.

(I also have a couple of contacts within Amazon I could probably ping to see if there are ways to speed it up.)

07-05-2013 02:18 PM #12 ThrvTrkr (Member)

Question: both you guys say Amazon hardware sucks? But then all these huge multi-national corps use it for their hosting (NASDAQ, Airbnb, Netflix, etc.). So, a little confused as to why. Can you explain?

07-06-2013 11:58 AM #13 caurmen (Administrator)

It's not that Amazon hardware sucks - I suspect it's absolutely bloody brilliant in a lot of ways. It's just not well suited for affiliate marketers.

Usually, latency isn't as crucial to most providers as it is to us. So the small/medium-sized SAAS people using Amazon EC2 don't care so much if they lose a couple of hundred milliseconds of response time. For us, on the other hand, it's a Very Bad Thing.

We also do unusually large amounts of database writes, which most other providers aren't doing, and Amazon's I/O layer is one of its slower areas on the default servers.

As for the big guys, they're not using the same servers. Amazon provisions much higher-performance hardware for specific needs - IO optimised, memory optimised, even GPU optimised - which would probably be fine for AM, but it's bloody expensive.

Basically, we're not their target market. EC2's great for a lot of stuff, but the raw speed requirements of AM make it a poor fit in our specific case.

Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Mobile