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Request: CDN FAQ (6)

10-03-2013 12:45 AM #1 aeroian (Member)
Request: CDN FAQ

Hi all,

I'm looking to use a CDN for mobile content, and I've had trouble searching for topics on this on the forum. (too generic of a search term). Would it be possible to get a sticky FAQ about CDNs?

I'm really looking to learn how/if they can deliver dynamic content. It doesn't make too much sense to me to deliver images on a local SE Asia server if the redirect link still goes through a server in Texas, especially for mobile! Is it possible to host a tracker on a CDN? Thanks!

10-03-2013 04:51 PM #2 rafael (Member)

ooh yes this would be a great tutorial! I understand the concept of CDNs but since I've never had to use one (yet) I'm not too sure of how to get setup,etc.

10-03-2013 07:56 PM #3 kai1 (Member)

I'd be interested too!

10-04-2013 04:09 PM #4 caurmen (Administrator)

Gotcha! I hear you, and I've added this to the Official STM To-Do List Of Doom!

I can see a CDN tutorial would be really useful.

Dynamic content and CDNs is a bit of a tricky one - there's no really easy way to do it short of deploying on Google App Engine or EC2, at least that I'm aware of. (If you know differently, let me know!) However, there may be ways around that. What sort of dynamic content are you interested in serving?

10-05-2013 02:03 AM #5 aeroian (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by caurmen View Post
Dynamic content and CDNs is a bit of a tricky one - there's no really easy way to do it short of deploying on Google App Engine or EC2, at least that I'm aware of. (If you know differently, let me know!) However, there may be ways around that. What sort of dynamic content are you interested in serving?
Perhaps dynamic content is a bit of a misnomer in this instance. I'm curious to know what the advantage of a CDN would be for say a mobile traffic source in SE Asia.

My logic is this: Traffic Source (SE Asia) >> My tracking link (Server in Texas) >> My Landing Page (SE Asia) >> My outbound link (Server in Texas) >> Offer (SE Asia)

So yes, although my LP would load faster, the redirects & database interaction still have to happen in the US. Is there any way to put all of that over on a CDN? Would that even be worth the effort? I know a while ago someone did a case study on page load time vs. conversion rate, and it really inspired me to optimize as much as possible

10-05-2013 12:43 PM #6 caurmen (Administrator)

This is one of the few situations where I'd actually recommend the vanilla Prosper approach over anything else. The huge advantage that Prosper's tracking has is that it loads the tracking code in the footer, meaning that the LP loads up first - and you can put the LP in its entirety on a CDN or a local server.

Even if you're using the standard redirect-page-first approach, though, a CDN will still make a huge difference. The latency from the US will be there for the initial page, but subsequent loading times will speed up a lot.

There are better solutions than the ones we're using now which could eliminate the problems we have, using distributed datastores, deferred writes, and clever processing, but sadly all the obvious approaches to that kind of global infrastructure at the moment are either very expensive (Amazon Redshift) or not suited to task (Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 standard). If you're running volume in a country, right now, my recommendation is to try to source a local (ish) server to that country and run tracking from there - although you'll still need to benchmark and test to make sure that the server doesn't slow you down more with substandard hardware.

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