Hi all,
The main benefit for a university, isn't load levels where things like varnish and other solutions will help but with page load speed.
The biggest difference is when targeting foreign students. For some clients we have been able to improve page load speed by 200% from areas such as asia/pacific. You only notice how slow your website loads when you end up travelling far overseas.
The one trick, is not to apply CDN domain names for people visiting locally. Use Geoip to only point to the CDN when outside the UK. It might sound obvious but isn't often implemented that way.
We've got more technical experience we can share if you're interested, in particular around cloudfront (either proxy or push configurations). Happy to share experiences if anyone's interested, just reach out....
Regards,
Piero
From: Paul Vetch
Sent: Tuesday, 13 September, 16:58
Subject: Re: Hosting of website assets in a Cloud/CDN environment
To: [log in to unmask]
Hi Scott
It’s worth exploring Cloudflare in the first instance; as a pull CDN it involves minimal configuration and no residual footprint on your own infrastructure or setup (which would normally be needed in the context of a ‘push’ solution like S3/CloudFront, Akamai, etc). The free version of Cloudflare is pretty compelling often enough, but we’ve implemented the Pro ($20 pcm) and Business ($200 pcm) versions for some of our clients who regularly receive high traffic (or attacks) with great results - and without the need for any additional push CDN. That said, I’d note that we’ve not found it necessary to implement any kind of CDN for www.ox.ac.uk<http://www.ox.ac.uk> to date - traditional varnish / memcache implementation (in concert with Drupal) has proven to be enough there, even though the site receives comparatively high levels of traffic.
Best wishes
Paul
Paul Vetch
Client Services Director
Torchbox Ltd
+44 (0) 1608 811870
+44 (0) 7976 297092
http://torchbox.com
http://wagtail.io
On 13 Sep 2016, at 13:14, Scott Sweeting <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Good afternoon,
First of all, please accept my apologies for cross-posting.
We are currently looking into hosting some of our website assets, including images and PDFs, in a Cloud or CDN environment in an effort to speed up page load times for international visitors. I have carried out some initial research and can see that there are many providers to choose from, with some charging for bandwidth and some only for the content storage. I appreciate that there are many points to consider, such as the type of content stored, how much is stored and the geographic region(s) that the content is stored in. Therefore, if you currently use, are considering or have experience using Cloud or CDN services then I would be most grateful for your input.
Many thanks in advance.
Kindest regards,
Scott
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Scott Sweeting
Web Developer
University of Sunderland
Student and Learning Support
T: +44 (0)191 515 2424
W: http://www.sunderland.ac.uk
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