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Why Your Loosing Clicks Without a CDN (30)

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Ok most of us feel that are servers are fast and things load great right?

Well thats true to some extent but it all depends where you are in reference to your server. If you don't believe me goto www.dslreports.com and do a speed test

when I test from NYC which I am close to I get speeds 2-3x that I do from Cali....

So what do you think those paid clicks get when trying to load stuff off your server?

Slow load times.....pops that never fully load....suck ass user experience.....which lowers that CTR.....

So what can we do?

Get a CDN....so you then run right over to amazon and signup for a free S3 account right?

WRONG!!

Amazon S3 does not equal a CDN.....they have a CDN product but its not S3...so S3 will just function like your server....it will load from wherever the datacenter is located..

A true CDN "caches" your content at "nodes" so it loads from the closest availble datacenter and can lead to very large improvements in load time....


See pics below....

W/O CDN


W/CDN


and thats just a very basic site....the larger the site the bigger the difference.....

Ok Mr. Bacon I'm sold but CDN's are expensive and hard to set up and run....

Ummm no..

Here is what I would recommend http://www.maxcdn.com/ and no I don't work for them...

Setting one up and using one is so easy you'll wonder why you ever signed up for a S3 account.

Basicly it works like this.....

You setup a "pull zone" and you CNAME that "link" they give you to a subdomain of your site.... like I did above...

But thats means I have to load all the files I want in a special folder, Mr. Bacon and thats a pain....

Again no....

When you setup your "pullzone" at MaxCDN you set it to the "root" HTML folder... or better known as "/" ...

So then when you want to load off the CDN you just pop that subdomain infront of your url like cdn.myurl.com....when you are uploading sites you still do it all the same way....no changes need to be made.....just upload it to your root or whatever folder you are using.....since MaxCDN is mapped to your root folder all folders under it are mapped as well.....

This all sound sooooo complicated.....it does but it really isn't....it takes about 10 min to setup....and have it running....

What are the issues?

Well the biggest issue with having a CDN is the cache itself.....if you make changes to a LP you need to purge the old files.....which is easily done....(one button click)....but you have to remember to do it....

Also to those of us doing int traffic.....a CDN is HUGE as most servers are located in the USA (unless you ask for one elsewhere).....

Ask yourself how much performance dif do you think you will have for your German visitors when the site loads from Amsterdam as opposed to Dallas, TX (big datacenter node)???? I bet you HAVE lost conversions over this and you didn't even know it....

So how much is this gonna all cost me Mr. Bacon??

not much MaxCDN for the first 1tb is only 4cents a GB ($39.95 for 1tb) , which is cheaper than most hosts.....you can buy additional GB's for around 8-10 cents and its a "pay as you go" plan and the bandwidth is good for 12 months......


Anyways I hope this helps in getting more conversions for all ye all.....

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Awesome post! I do quite some volume with PPV and never used Maxcdn.

Will give that a try right away.

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Why not use Amazon's service ? Pennies per Terra byte and with bucket explorer the process is super simple.

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Never tried it so I can't say.....all I know is there is nothing to manage with MaxCDN once its set....you do nothing diff.....other than drop a cdn. in front of your url....

it looks like bucket explorer is a software product......and you host off S3??.....which just another step......and to me I like easy.....and this was the easiest I could find..... and the speed is great....

Like I said the only thing you ever have to do....is purge the CDN on a change but that is done with one click.....

and I don't think that cloudfront is pennys.....see below...

No minimum fee and no over usage fee.
It costs just 15 cents per gig per month to store the data and only 10 to 18 cents per gig for data transfer. If you use only half a gig of the average space in a month, you only pay 7.5 cents. If you store terabytes, you won't pay any over usage fee. Like other utilities (electricity and gas) you pay for what you use. With Amazon you don't pay a minimum monthly fee

again I could be way off....but I doubt its penny per TB...maybe per GB.....again this is for CDN not standard S3....

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That alone is worth the monthly price actually. I am a creature of convenience, or rather one that likes the path of least resistance.

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Sounds cool, I'm gonna give it a try. Thanks for the info!

Use coupon code wht at checkout to save 25% off your first TB.

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Damn man! Awesome post.

I've been guilty of not paying much to my loading times. I will look into a CDN, thanks for the heads up.

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awesome post dan. good to have you on this forum

maybe someone should do a 3 way splittest - same campaign, but 1 run of say storm, 1 of cloudfront (amazon), and 1 of maxcdn

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Hey Dan I'm using Amazon Cloudfront and your post made me wonder if
MaxCDN would be better.

I see a $39.95 cost at the website, do you pay that for 1 TB and just keep
using it until you run out of bandwidth?

My last cloudfront bill was only $1+ but I'm happy to pay more for a faster
service (if it is indeed faster).

Thanks for the recommendation!

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great info!

Was about to start a thread on "How can I setup CDN to speed up load times?"

Beat me to it ...

how can you test your loadspeed from different locations? Does Pingdom do that as well?

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Nice post!

Personally, I love how 'techie' Amazon Web Services are.
I'd just tested out a vps build on there (large instance), ready to send some mega traffic to, to see if I could snap it in half!
Problem is, ... as a 'hosting environment', ... unless you are a mega-geek, it's pretty difficult to setup properly with automated backups, server snapshots etc. It's also a relative pain in the ass to install CPanel, or similar.

In the end, whilst it was up and running, for what the config was actually going to cost annually (commiting to 3 yrs for a much cheaper price), it didn't seem that 'high spec', ... I wish they'd add some additional machine sizes / configs in there to give you a better choice.

I'm tempted after reading this though, to build out an Amazon CDN, ... I think they'd be cheaper, and I'm pretty sure they'd have a better network than MaxCDN - although that's just a wild guess.

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Awesome post polarbacon! Always glad to learn something new

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this should entertain you nicely http://www.cloudclimate.com/cdn-speed-test/ sometimes it doesn't always work great but its the best I have been able to find

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Well you really can't but in theroy the CDN handles all of that as they have nodes that cache your content all over the place...

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http://browsermob.com/performance-testing Check these guys out.....
Just found this site myself about 30 secs ago.

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here are my load benchmarks from Thailand



Winners (looking at global performance):

1. Contendo
2. Azure
3. Edgecast

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funny that Akamai ranks as bad as it does it has nodes everywhere.....its what has-offers uses btw.......

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Yeah surprising.

Azure is about $160 pm for 1TB of transfer - so considerably more the MaxCDN.
Edgecast from memory is also very expensive.
Couldnt find so quickly pricing for Contendo.

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let's say you're bidding on facebook.com or google.com with ppv, the cdn won't crash?

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Awesome post! They just got a new customer. Cheers.

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In my experience the CDN can cope with a lot cause your visitors will come from different areas and therefore will go to different server locations.

If however they go to your server first (ie to load the html) and then all images are hosted on a cdn your server could be a bottleneck.

Theres a good post by bbrock32 on the forum where he actually split tested conversion stats with and without CDN and he had better results without.

With PPV its all about load time.

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So does that mean that, with a CDN, I don't really need a very fast server for PPV?

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The Amazon CloudFront is cheap and simple to setup if you know how to setupS3.

This link shows you how to setup CloudFront for your server: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/amazon-...-work-with-s3/

Pro's:

Cheap
Fast
Manage like an FTP account.

Cons:

Low Intermediate Level Setup

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@polarbacon

So if I've created a pull zone for mysite.com, put cdn.mysite.com in "Custom CDN Domain" field, and CNAME the URL MaxCDN gave me, all I need to for CDN to work is add "cdn" in front of all my link like this:

cdn.mysite.com?subid=[subid]
cdn.mysite.com/folder1/index.php?subid=[subid]

Did I get it right?

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correct.

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Ahhhh that's what I was thinking about! Been using Amazon just because it's cheap to test, thought shit there must be an easier way to basically mirror my site so I don't have to change so many links. Niccceeeee.

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A free alternative CDN is CloudFlare.. Already use it for a client and it saves about 4TB bandwidth per month (static files, js, images etc...).

So easy to use, just point the nameservers of the domain to CloudFlare's and you're ready to go

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So basically CDN will cache my pages and load them from closest location?

What if I have a dynamic webpage which shows geo location. If server caches the page it won't display this correctly, right?
What If I want to detect the user agent and then show either web or wap optimized version of page.

So visitor won't actually even reach my server so no server side scripts will work, right?

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A CDN will only host static files, images, js, CSS etc. if you're using Php then that's server side and will be processed by your server.

That's my understanding of it anyway.

I will add I split tested the same lander with and without a CDN for the static files over the course of a week. I sent a little over 100k visitors a day between them and every day the page without the CDN converted higher. I can't explain it and have no idea why, just thought I should mention it.

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@grikis you don't want to put PHP files or pages with dynamic stuff on the CDN, they will get processed once -> static content and then they stay like that, so obviously not useful. So you're correct, anything involving server-side scripting should not be on the CDN.

@jonemd is it possible it's an SSL issue, e.g. loading unsecure content on a secure page or something like that? Are the load times that different? I had some landers with CDN hosted images at one point and I remember the site appearing to load faster when it was all on my server. Kinda felt like everything went faster when it was pulling it all from the same place rather than from a CDN node somewhere. Annoyed me a little, I wanted CDN images -> velociraptor visual load speed boost.

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