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Rackspace Slowing LP Down...What Am I Doing Wrong? (7)

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I've spent the afternoon trying to host a basic LP on Rackspace, but it seems to be loading significantly slower than just hosting on my BH dedicated server. I'm guessing that I'm doing some thing wrong, but I can't work out what.

The country I'm trying to improve speeds is in South America, and the results using the CDN are:

Server in US total load time (average): 0.68s
Rackspace total load time (average): 0.87s

I loaded the LP a few times to check it was cached in the nearest CDN and ran the test 3 times for each LP. I used the tool at Uptrends to check loading times.

Side note: I also noticed that some of loading times for Rackspace in other countries were even slower compared to the dedicated server. New Zealand, for example, was over 1.2s total time on each test.

The process I used to set up Rackspace:

1. Created a container (the only option was the UK region, but as I understand it this won't effect the LP being distributed around the CDN - or will it?)
2. Uploaded the LP files using Cyberduck
3. Enabled public CDN on the container
4. Added a CNAME record in Namecheap from a subdomain of my tracking domain to the link provided int he website section of the container

Does that process look correct? Everything seems to load correctly. I'm using the UK version of Rackspace if that makes a difference.

Thanks

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How 'heavy' is the lander?
Have you optimized the graphics?
Is the lander waiting for external jquery/javascript/CSS code?

Every saving makes a difference.

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Hmm- it may be that the caching is not optimised to serve small numbers of files fast.

What sort of volume are you expecting on this lander?

I'd strongly recommend getting in touch with rackspace support too. Their product is meant to make your pages fast. If it's not doing that, that is very much their problem as well as yours!

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The LP could definitely be improved, it's mainly just text but it loads some external files and a font from Google which probably doesn't help. Loading with a CDN should still be faster from South America than loading the same LP from a US server though.

Not sure about volume yet, this LP is currently only getting 10k-20k visits per day but the goal was to use a CDN to speed up all my LPs. I'm starting to think a VPS in each country, or at least each continent, might be easier though.

You're right about getting in touch with Rackspace, something definitely isn't right - I'll update this thread if I find anything useful.

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1. Find out where their PoPs are. For Rackspace this might not be possible. If they don't have a LATAM PoP on their budget Akamai offering... well there you go.

2. Run all content from the CDN.

3. Spam it with some traffic.

4. Measure load speeds with RUM e.g. Pingdom or Cedexis.

Not sure what you are measuring with but trust the real user load speeds over anything you are testing yourself (you and/or a single server, or a few, are not reliable indicators of real world performance).

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This is mainly why I went with CDN77. They have more PoPs in South America, including one in Brazil (where I run a lot of my traffic). I did a bunch of Real World Monitoring tests using Pingdom, and after a few weeks of pulling my hair out trying to make sense of the data, I decided that CDN77 won (for my GEOs). I was testing CDN77, Rackspace and a WiredTree SSD VPS (Chicago). Some of my LP CTRs went from 33% to around 50%.

TIP: Do run Real World Monitoring tests 100% for sure, but don't expect the data to be straightforward. Your best best is to test on Wifi traffic everywhere so it will be more consistent.

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I thought the same off initial tests with Rackspace Vs. a Wiredtree VPS using pingdom and the likes, but I ran a test on load impact which tests the page with many simultaneous connections worldwide


Wiredtree



Rackspace

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