how a cdn can save you money and make your website faster

Save Money and Make Your Website Faster with a CDN

by Aaron [email protected]

Aaron Weiss | Senior SEO Strategist | [email protected]://www.tampa-seo.com

mailto:[email protected]


• Shared Hosting is usually the least expensive option to host a website with moderate traffic.– Usually less than $10/month– Feature “Unlimited” Storage and Bandwidth*– Cram hundreds (sometimes thousands) of

accounts on one physical server– Great for new and small websites with minimal

traffic

SHARED HOSTING




Did you notice the asterisk?

SHARED HOSTING




*Most shared hosts that offer “unlimited” storage and bandwidth have caveats to this benefit. Here’s DreamHost’s explanation:

“You DO still have to worry about plenty of other things though… if your site isn’t well optimized and is causing issues for others on your shared server (either because it’s pounding the CPU, hogging RAM, or doing tons of disk I/O), you may be asked to sign up for your own [Virtual] Private Server.”

Source: https://www.dreamhost.com/legal/unlimited-policy/

SHARED HOSTING




The next step up from shared hosting is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Managed VPS. With the increase in performance there is also the following:

• Increased hosting costs• Must manage a set amount of space and

bandwidth• Requires additional technical knowledge• Expensive overage costs

SHARED HOSTING




But there’s a better way




According to Wikipedia.org:“A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large fraction of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks.”

What is a CDN?




• Increases speed of assets such as CSS, JavaScript files, and images

• Boost reliability and response times• Regional delivery and global reachability• Prevent expensive overage fees at your host• Reduce the load on a web host as requests for files is passed to

the CDN

Why Would You Need a CDN?




Who Uses a CDN?




• Delay the need to the purchase higher performance hosting.• Reduce or eliminate expensive overage costs.

How Will a CDN Save Me Money?

Even better…




How Will a CDN Save Make Me Money?

A famous study from Amazon had one set of users receive Amazon pages at normal speed and another

set that had a 1 second delay.

The result?





Amazon’s 1 second delay could cost the company

$1.6 billion dollars per year.

Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost-amazon-16-billion-sales





Google did the same thing, but with their searches. They delayed searches by 4/10ths of a second.

The result…





A 4/10ths second delay could cost Google

8 Billion Searches a day.

Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost-amazon-16-billion-sales





How Much Money Are You Losing?




CDNs and SEO?

Yes, CDNs are Good for SEO

Google has stated that speed is one of the hundreds of factors that impact websites.

They even have a free tool called PageSpeed that analyzes a site and tells you exactly what to fix:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

Pingdom also has a great tool as well:

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/








CDNs and SEO?

Smartphones and Tablets

Cell data isn’t as fast as broadband just yet. But if you can deliver your content quickly, your mobile users will thank you.

They are just as impatient as desktop users. 74% of mobile phone users will only wait 5 seconds for a page to load.

Source: https://gigaom.com/2011/07/19/consumers-losing-patience-with-the-slow-mobile-web/




How to Add a CDN to My Site?

Adding a CDN requires the following:

1. A CDN provider2. Deploying content to a CDN3. Changing the URLs of files from your domain to the CDN




CDN ProvidersFind a provider your trust and can afford. There are hundreds for CDNs, but here are a few:




More on CloudFlare

• Not technically a CDN, but a security service that accidentally realized they made their clients’ sites faster.

• Now has static caching capabilities similar to a CDN• Free Plan can do wonders for any website• Can combine CloudFlare with another CDN.




WordPress CDN with W3 Total Cache

Since 23.2% of all websites use WordPress (it’s growing too).

W3 Total Cache plugin works perfectly. It’s Free!

Source: http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all




WordPress CDN with W3 Total Cache

What is W3 Total Cache?

This plugin is a caching plugin for WordPress that can creates cached content. This includes combining, minifying, and caching JS, CSS, and

HTML Files.

CloudFlare also does this too, but W3 Total Cache has more control.

Adding a CDN isn’t too complicated with WordPress and W3 Total Cache.




Example Experiment

Venture Harbour (ventureharbour.com) improved their website’s speed by 30% with MaxCDN.

Source: https://www.ventureharbour.com/content-delivery-network/




Is a CDN Really Right For You?

• Do you have tens of thousands of visitors per month?• Not ready to upgrade to VPS hosting?• Want to find some extra speed?• Does your site have potential to go “viral”?• Need to reach global visitors?

If none of the above apply, stick with CloudFlare’s FREE Plan.




Questions ?

Aaron WeissSenior Web Strategist

[email protected]

• Twitter: @cinemafunk (personal/hobby)• Facebook: aaronmweiss• Google: +AaronWeissRocks




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