Hey guys. All my traffic is international dating offers (euro) and my current sever is a beyond hosting starter sever based in the US. Getting a leg up on the competition is everything in this game so I figured it would be a good idea to sign up for a CDN to help my landers load that much faster.
For anyone currently using a CDN, what CDN do you recommend and why?
I dug through a lot of old posts and it looks like people recommend Rackspace Cloudfiles or MaxCDN. Are these still the leading options?
Ruck from IMGrind swears by Cloudflare CDN but I saw a lot of hate for this CDN in old posts (People say that it's security features are too sensitive and block people from viewing your lander.) Does this CDN still suck or did they fix their issues?
So what CDN do you guys use/prefer???
CDN77.com
Cheap, pay as you go for usage, amazing global coverage (includes South America, India etc), nice interface, push zones, very easy to use.
There are many. I would recommend Rackspace or BeyondHosting's CDN. Essentially Akamai vs Level3 as far as I know. I have only heard good things about BH's CDN performance wise though it is slightly pricier - but we all know you generally get what you pay for.
What I would highly HIGHLY recommend is using NewRelic to actually get Real User Monitoring data that gives hard evidence on what impact the CDN is having on load times in different countries. This is possible with their free service. However, I doubt this won't be possible with a BH Starter VPS (I assume you mean the cheapest one).
For anyone else in this situation, seriously consider tracking real user load time like this. All it takes is splitting traffic between two pages with CDN and non-CDN links. In russia for instance I found switching between Rackspace CDN links for images/external css file vs all on my BH VPS in the US barely gained any load time decreases or CTR increases. In fact, it seemingly fluctuated day to day.
@ Zeno: Thanks Zeno. New Relic sounds interesting. Just curious, why doesn't it work with the BH starter VPS?
As far as I know, the starter VPS is some sort of hybrid that uses shared resources rather than a standalone, isolated VPS. Thus you don't have the ability to install your own extensions/modules and such.
Definitely agree with Zeno here. If you're making a big change like using a CDN, test and monitor carefully to see what your real-world times are looking like.
(Hmm, I should do a tutorial on using New Relic...)
That would be an awesome tut caurmen. Something that explains the optimal way to set up a CDN with your existing landers and testing the difference in results. I saw some thread where Tijn posted a video about CDN setup but the link was dead...
I actually talked a bit about testing out a CDN in this thread and this one - but the tests that Zeno's recommending are more robust, and I'll look into doing a tutorial soon!