Long(ish) Post on Content Delivery Networks or CDN

vyas · April 2020

A few days ago I wrote a long-ish post about Content Delivery Networks. I am definitely not a technical writer, and decided to write about a topic I knew very little about till recently. The post ended up becoming much more comprehensive than I anticipated; at nearly 3,700 words. I am am posting the link to that article in this forum, knowing that I will get some good feedback and some brickbats (both welcome) to make the post better. Have I missed any obvious names? Are there any other sources or resources that will make this post more useful to the readers?

Here's the link
How to Use CDN or Content Delivery Networks for Website Speed

Summary:
In my post, I write about using content delivery network or CDN for delivery of different types of content:

a. images (e.g.files from Flickr) that you can display on your website,

b. Videos (e.g.embedding a YouTube video) on your blog,

c. Audio (e.g. Podcast episodes)

d. Other files,scripts, or text.

This post is not a review, but more like an introduction to the un-initiated. You may find some familiar names in the post, and some lesser known ones.

Thanks to @seriesn for the egging.

p.p.s: For the curious: This site is hosted on SmallWeb Singapore, CMS is Bludit.

Abdullah · April 2020

Thank you, informative. Would like to see the post on Arvancloud CDN.
I tried them but in India, traffic was served from NL. They have a free tier.

deepak_leb · April 2020

Boss, that's one long post @vyas

vyas · April 2020

Lol thanks @deepak_leb I guess it got a little out of hand, length wise. Had to split the post into two companion posts (Updated the Intro section with the other posts)
@Abdullah sometime next month I might give Arvancloud a try from Bengaluru, so may not see much difference ...

vyas · May 2020

@vyas said:

@Abdullah sometime next month I might give Arvancloud a try from Bengaluru, so may not see much difference ...

Dear All,

couple of updates:
1. The post stands at 4,400 words now, and will try to make it a little more reader friendly in the coming week.

Also wrote a companion post of another 3,500 words on "Which is the best Image optimization service"? Where I have compared 25 different image compression/ optimization services for web, such as Shortpixel and Tinypng. Hope my madness benefits someone.

Really impressed by imgbot and Bulkimageresizer. The speed and compression ratios are great. Not to mention generous file sizes- they allow upto 100 images at a time, each upto 25 MB.

short summary: see the attached screenshot. the image used for the test is:
Image Title: beverage-book-caffeine-coffee; Photo by Spencer Selover from Pexels

Size of the original Image = 4.13 MB.

( I ran a longer/ bigger test on 30 images measuring 360 MB on six different services, but will spare you the details)

I decided to merge two of my blogs ( I have/ had five) and things were getting out of hand. In the meantime, I made a mess of transferring the site from Smallweb Singapore shared hosting (Bludit CMS) to Wordpress on a VPS. Before you raise eyebrows, I repeat. Yes, Wordpress!

It did not help matters that around the time of the transfer my domain registrar decided to do a system maintenance, and @smallweb had to play agony aunty that morning,

@Abdullah

Arvancloud seems promising- they just bumped the CDN bandwidth in free tier to 50 GB/month, I even set up a site for video streaming (all SFW HD videos from Mixkit). Works okay till 480P, at HD be prepared for buffering- atleast for me at home.

Quirks:

For India, they serve from a DC in Iran. so there is some lag. The menu changes mysteriously to Farsi every 2 or 3 minutes. While uploading the video, browser froze.

On positive note, they have launched buckets S3 compatible, you can host static site a la Cloudflare. I think their focus area is Middle East and China though they have a POP in Alaska and Greenland as per their map.

Best wishes,

deepak_leb · May 2020

I can't get anything. But you sound cool @vyas

seriesn · May 2020

@deepak_leb said:
I can't get anything. But you sound cool @vyas

ROFL.

vyas · May 2020

@deepak_leb said:
I can't get anything. But you sound cool @vyas

thanks for your kind words.
My post(s) are about using different services to reduce the size of images on website/webpage, to help with faster loading, yadaa yada..

I have also admitted indirectly that I did was nuts, would not recommend it. Hope that is a simpler explanation.

Cheers

poppz · May 2020

Great post, lots of information and easy to read. Thank you!

However, would you mind checking out https://kraken.io/ as well?

Abdullah · May 2020

@vyas Thank you for your time & effort.?

AK_KWH · May 2020

Thanks for the worth share but fix the cache settings you are using lazy load maybe which is causing issue i was reading it from mobile so just thumbnail was the only image which was working fix it for better user experience

vyas · May 2020

@AK_KWH said:
Thanks for the worth share but fix the cache settings you are using lazy load maybe which is causing issue i was reading it from mobile so just thumbnail was the only image which was working fix it for better user experience

Thanks...This is a new thing for me (Redis + using Gumlet for Image CDN), haven't found the root cause, will address. Sorry about the user experience part.

Long(ish) Post on Content Delivery Networks or CDN

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