I know that one of the most frustrating issues when it comes to surfing the net is the amount of time it takes to load certain websites. Being a developer and having gone from shared to VPS to dedicated and all of it in-between, I know what it means to have a slow website here and there. However regardless of the type of hosting your site is on, I just might have a solution for you that may boost page load speeds that much more to keep your visitors content and happy.
The solution (or my proposal) is MaxCDN. I know there are a lot of CDN providers out there from media temple to cloud fare however I have been with these guys for ages and I am impressed by their service and value.
First off – what is a CDN?
Wikipedia describes it best: 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, URLs and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks.
In laymen terms this means that bandwidth usage from your site is reduced, it improves page load times and increases the availability of your content around the globe as there are multiple nodes, depending on how the infrastructure is built. Picture your site on a shared hosting provider like hostgator. Now several users want to load your page at the same time however the page loads are very slow for each user as the server needs to “spit” out content towards each users browser which causes congestion in internet traffic. What the CDN does is it takes pieces of your site from media to scripts and files and disperses them to the data centers (servers) of the provider around the globe so that when all these users try to access your site it grabs bits of information from everywhere depending on distance or number of hops between nodes of where the user is sitting, which essentially speeds up your website.
Why MaxCDN?
I have been with MaxCDN for quite some time and can only speak good about their services and customer support. I have done intense testing with their CDN network and can only verify that website speeds increase. NOt only do they have a great 24/7 support but a simple dashboard great analytics and setting up is a breeze for any novice. Aside from that the costs are fantastic and more than reasonable.
Have a look on their website here – they thoroughly explain everything around their service in simple terminology. Go for it!