It’s finally happened – your website got linked by a major news outlet and thousands of new users are checking out your business. But with all these new eyeballs comes a huge load on your web server. You’ve taken all the usual steps to optimize your images and scripts, but the onslaught is too much, and the site grinds to a crawl and finally crashes, costing you untold sums in potential new customers. How can you avoid this scenario on your website?
You might think you need to upgrade your web hosting to a server with more memory or network resources to accommodate traffic surges like this, but that’s a bit like building an addition to your house for a guest you’re having over for the weekend. There’s an easier way to give you peace of mind against traffic spikes without increasing your monthly web hosting cost – use a content delivery network (CDN) to offload your commonly downloaded files.
The basic idea behind a CDN is that your server is doing more work than it needs to. Even with a relatively simple setup like a blog, the server is reading the database, maintaining user sessions and managing email, among hundreds of other low-level tasks. A CDN is a specialized system with one specific purpose: serving files. It consists of a set of servers (nodes) distributed across a wide geographical area, each with its own copy of a particular resource. When a request is made for a file, the network finds the closest node to the user’s current location and grabs it from there. This reduces latency and results in faster load times for your visitors, all while reducing stress on your web server.
So how do you get started with a CDN? There are several options, but a great introductory solution is a service called CloudFlare CDN. CloudFlare has several nodes across the US, Europe and Asia, and they offer a free version that is very simple to set up. You tell CloudFlare your domain name, and they give you updated nameservers to point to. That’s all there is to it – your static content is now hosted on CloudFlare’s globally distributed network.
A CDN like CloudFlare is an excellent way to help maximize the efficiency of your webserver by offloading content requests, giving you faster page load times and protection against traffic floods. Be sure to take advantage of this powerful resource in your next web project!
Why You Can’t Go Another Second Without A CDN
