Use a CDN to Instantly Improve Your Website's Performance by 20% or More

If you have a lot of static content to store and you aren't looking forward to setting up and maintaining your own giganto SAN,  maybe you can push off a lot of the hard lifting to a CDN?

Jesse Robbins at O'Reilly Radar posts that you have a lot more options now because the number of Content Distribution Networks have doubled since last year. In fact, Dan Rayburn says there are now 28 CDN providers in the market. Hopefully you can find reasonable pricing at one of them.

Other than easing your burden, why might a CDN work for you? Because it makes your site faster and customers like that. How can a CDN so dramatically improve your site's performance?



Steve Saunders, author of High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers, has using a CDN has one of his "Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site."

About CDNs Steve says:

Remember that 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. This is the Performance Golden Rule, as explained in The Importance of Front-End Performance. Rather than starting with the difficult task of redesigning your application architecture, it's better to first disperse your static content. This not only achieves a bigger reduction in response times, but it's easier thanks to content delivery networks.
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At Yahoo!, properties that moved static content off their application web servers to a CDN improved end-user response times by 20% or more. Switching to a CDN is a relatively easy code change that will dramatically improve the speed of your web site.

It's at least worth looking into if looking for a performance boost or are concerned about storing so many buckets of bits.