Using a Content Delivery Network
by Nick Smith 1st May 2009
UKClimbing.com has just started using a CDN for caching popular static content (mostly JPEG photos). In essence, this distributes our most popular images to Edge servers all over the world, so when you visit a UKC page, the HTML part of the page will load from our central server as normal, but the images will load from a CDN server that is physically closer to you. This should mean quicker page loading for end users.
As well as quicker loading for users, it benefits UKC by reducing the traffic to our central server, and also by reducing monthly bandwidth costs.
After looking at a number of different CDN solutions in the marketplace, UKC has gone with simpleCDN's Lightning service, which offers an easy set up of automatic HTTP edge caching from our central server.
Updated June 2009: we've been using simpleCDN for nearly 2 months now, and apart from their hopelessly slow customer support, it's gone pretty smoothly, with some 3.6 million images and 165Gb of traffic served from their servers each month.
Updated January 2010: we've stopped using simpleCDN, due to regular reports from our users, over many weeks, that photos were loading very slowly or not at all. simpleCDN didn't even bother to reply to support tickets. We've switched to SoftLayer's CloudLayer CDN service, which is already proving to be far more reliable and faster, as well as giving good technical support.
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