Thanks for the suggestion Lennie.
probably would do it…
As a small biz, perhaps more expensive and overpowered for my needs.
I’ve solved my issue, for now, with simple web hosting, for images only, using rsync to synchronize with my local site. Offloading the images will work for a few months, given my loads… and then I can use the cdn to pull those images via origin pull from their faster servers when I need to upgrade again. (adding one level of complexity and synching… but hey, you do what you gotta do
For now problem solved… although not without much waste of time testing and fine-tuning. as they say, the “devil’s in the details”…
I was truly surprised that rsync up to PUSH zone would not work for a live site. Lesson learnt.
Thanks for everyone questions and suggestions. Learnt a lot here these past few days.
set up rsync system to sync up all images and some other files.
setup dns to cover up to 5 “hosts” all pointing to same IP at host site.
rewrote some URLS on site to distribute some loading of images, css. js.
after first tests, went back and tweaked local website some .
test page results shown here. http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120202_NS_33BR7/
The initial latencies are due to my own office machine web server, sitting on DSL (only 0.64Mbps UPload speed). ONE DAY, I’ll move to vps hosting perhaps. Up until now, ALL hosting for my site was from my office iMac, busy with many other chores… still is in fact (just images offloaded).
in my case, this shows almost as good results as I would have gotten using any CDN for now. IN fact, given better RTT on first hits for my large site… actually much better overall for most of my visitors.
YMWillVary
Thanks everyone, it’s been enlightening for me.
–Vince.
Vince, my CDN provider lets me upload (or purge) a specific URL to all of the CDN’s servers by simply entering the URL to my control panel. I had nothing better to do this morning, so I wrote a simple script which copied URLs from my spreadsheet and pasted them to my CDN’s control panel, one-by-one, about 4000 URLs in total.
Marvin, that’s great.
I discoverd that using the PUSH , as you are doing, still meant that the files would not be LIVE for a few hours to days, even at the base CDN location.
I utilize Rsync now with typical webhosting now and found it much speedier in my case than using MaxCDN for MY specific sites.
Can you specify what you actually mean when you say “a specific URL to all of the CDN’s servers” – you sync with each edge location, or they sych internally? If the latter, that’s what MaxCDN does… but with the lag on the base CDN to start. Then they propogate (synch) to the edge servers from hours to days later. I guess two hours after upload they are LIVE to all requests. This is because the server you upload to is NOT the same server which feeds out your files, thus a synch cycle is required first.
I found with regular webhosting, they are live as soon as uploaded, instead. A simple “rsync” job covers that quickly for some 90,000 files for me.
Just like IcEWoLF above, I use EdgeCast CDN at the moment.
I use “Origin-Pull”. However, in my CDN’s control panel, I can enter a URL (for example: http: //cdn.example.com/new.gif), and the file will be almost instantly (less then a minute, based on my observations) cached by all edge servers.
So far I’ve just used two CDN’s. Neither are perfect but I figured I’d post my experience with them.
Amazon Cloudfront. Amazon has gotten better the past couple years as their network has grown. They have a very consistently fast CDN with no monthly fee. You simply pay for usage. This ends up being insanely cheap for the little guy. My sites collectively receive about 500 visits a day and Amazon was only costing me about 10 cents a month.
The main limitations are:
They don’t have native support for gzip when using an Amazon S3 origin. If you want gzip you have to set up a custom origin. Not necessarily a deal breaker, but certainly not as user friendly as some of the alternatives.
They don’t support SSL for custom domains. You can only use HTTPS if you use their long unfriendly URLs.
RackSpace Cloud Files. After RackSpace switched to Akamai they became a very attractive option. Akamai has edge locations deployed in 72 countries and they have an obvious advantage in certain countries. Australia was the one where Akamai really stands out vs Amazon, for example. Once again, RackSpace has no monthly fee and charges purely on usage (their pricing is similar to Amazon). But unlike Amazon, they actually have native support for gzip. In fact, no configuration is necessary to enable gzip. They automatically deliver any text files with gzip.
Limitations:
They don’t support far-future expiration dates. The limit is 72 hours.
They don’t support folders.
Usually performance is great, but I’ve also found it to be extremely slow on occasion during the past couple months (like 5 seconds to load a 40KB image). It could be slow DNS resolution, or maybe an extremely slow cache miss. I haven’t yet identified the problem in a test because like I said… it’s usually fast.
Does Cloud Files let you use an arbitrary origin server or do you need to host your files on their service? Might be worth it to get the Akamai footprint, just adds some complexity to my deployment if I want to play with it.
I haven’t looked into setting up a custom origin server with them and I don’t know if it’s possible. So far I’ve only uploaded files directly through their control panel.
So basically it seems one needs to host his website at RackSpace to be able to use the CDN. And the RackSpace’s CDN offering currently doesn’t seem to even offer origin pull, based on what the people in the linked topic mentioned. That’s too bad. I’d be interested in testing the Akamai CDN offered by RackSpace if it didn’t require me to host my site with RackSpace.
No you don’t have to host your website with RackSpace to use the CDN. You just have to host your static files with them. And it’s dirt cheap to do so. I’ve been using them for months and still haven’t gotten a single bill or paid them a dime since my usage numbers are so low. It’d be a different story if I had millions of visitors a day. But 500 visits a day with a few images, css, and js files amounts to very little bandwidth usage.
And they do offer origin pull, but only against their own servers. To be clear, what that topic is actually about is the lack of support for a custom origin server.
By the way, if someone tries RackSpace I’d be curious if you experience the same sporadic performance problems I have been recently. It’s always possible that it’s a localized issue.
Thanks for the clarification, SWortham. That’s tempting to try. I’d like to see what features the CDN control panel offers as far as features. I’ll see if RackSpace has a PDF manual for download.
Technically you don’t need to “host” your website at rackspace, you just need to be able to get all of your static files into their S3-like storage solution. I like origin pull because it’s essentially zero-config but if you have a release process you can have it push your static content to their servers as part of the push.
Might be worth the effort for some for low-cost Akamai coverage. I may experiment with it but I expect my laziness will win out and I’ll want to keep things simple.
Yeah, this is one of the reasons I’ve switched back to Amazon for now. I still follow RackSpace’s blog though. If they fix some of these limitations their service could be killer.
The pricing and network footprint look really good (and they claim to be anycast). I’m a little worried about the busted grammar on the pricing page - http://www.cdn77.com/pricing:
I know it’s probably picking nits but I’m used to filtering mail with similar characteristics very carefully before handing my credit card over to the Nigerian prince. It looks like it’s an offshoot from a UK company that provides hosting so it’s probably fine, I just scare easily
Looks to me like, the owner of CDN77 is the same as:
I made an account at CDN77 and tried it. There website is still very new, lots of features missing. I requested a few of them and they mentioned they would put some up today and an other tomorrow.
Below is the feature list of what they probably want to support:
Their DNS is anycast, their CDN isn’t. They use DNS “geographic load balancing” (give the client an IP-address of a POP closest to the user).
What I really like about it, their anycast DNS seems really fast. Faster than the DNSMadeEasy I’m currently using.
I’m trying to find out who is behind the DNS part (if they don’t run it themselfs) but I haven’t figured it all out yet.
No, I had the same thing, and not just on the pricing page. Just now I glanced at a page and read “Do you want try CDN?”. Good for a laugh, but along with the very large number of POPs for a start-up, the focus on improving “Google positions”, and the lack of technical information about their network, I don’t feel inclined to give up reputable services such as DNS Made Easy or CloudFront in their favor.
… yes, but it’s always nice to see a new player. They certainly offer a lot of POPs for a decent price. It will be interesting to see how well they will do over the next little while.
I’ve noticed the above mentioned wording, too, but I have a higher level of tolerance in this area as English is my second language, just like I suspect is the case with the guys behind CDN77.com.
Good luck to them. If anyone gives their service a try, do post feedback here…
