Try putting your site(s) on a CDN for only $1!
 

Right now MaxCDN ( http://www.maxcdn.com/ ) is running a promotion for new customers to put your site(s) on a CDN for only $1. This gets you 1TB of bandwidth. What is a CDN? It is a content delivery network designed to serve your surfers different parts of your web site from locally based peers.

On a typical blog the surfer receives the index page, CSS files, Javascript files, pictures and any other content from your server. If they live in Europe and your server is in Seattle this can be both time consuming and taxing on your server. With a CDN the index page still comes from your server (although that can be delivered by the CDN too), but the rest of the files come from the CDN. Now one request to your server really is only a single request and not 10 to 12 or more.

Your server load will be drastically reduced. Your complete page load times will be reduced. Your BW bill from your host will be reduced.

For $1 you can't beat the price for trying out a CDN and seeing if it offers you any benefits. Small to medium sized networks will find that 1TB is plenty for an entire year.

You can also serve your videos from the CDN and severely reduce the load to your own server(s).

What are the advantages?

What are the steps in the setup process?

Please tell me about how your CDN's proxies handle the Vary header.
Also proxy-revalidate and Connection.

Most CDN operators have no idea what these are, which means they are trying to build a proxy network, but have no clue how proxies are supposed to work, ergo things break.

I don't run MaxCDN and half of the adult industry uses their NetDNA network. I am just letting people know about the $1 promotion. If you have ever flirted with the idea of having a CDN, this would be the time to test it out.

Setting it up is brain dead easy... In your registrar you create a CNAME for something like cdn.domain.com and point it to their servers (they will give you a link). Then in Wordpress for example you just add that cdn.domain.com to the Super Cache plugin under the CDN tab or search for the CDN plugin if you don't use Super Cache and it automatically swaps out everything for you.

Can you explain it a bit more V_Rocks... How would you set things up with just a "regular" site? i.e. not wordpress, so the CDN handles images, videos, css, js etc etc etc

so is this $1 recurring at $39.95 or it's $1 for 1 TB until it's burned and then $39,95 for every additional TB...

Seems like the $1 is for 1TB that you have to use in a year.. After that I have no idea... Also don't understand about the disk space pricing.. Do you have to also pay for caching of things? or? Clearly I have no idea how this stuff works.. :1orglaugh

$1 for the 1TB until it is burned or 1 year. Which ever comes first. When it renews you can use coupon codes and get it for $29.95 the next year or 1TB burned...

To set a site up with it you would need to first create an account. Then add the site in question you want a CDN for. In this example it will be cdn.domain.com. When you set this up in the MaxCDN.com admin it will give you a link to your CDN for that domain. Lets pretend it says cdn.tempest.netdna.com. Now can do one of two things depending on how your registrar/hosting works. My registrar allows me to enter my own DNS settings. So I would point a CNAME DNS entry to cdn.tempest.netdna.com. If my registrar didn't allow this I would contact my hosting company and request them to create the CNAME and point it to that address.

Now when ever a request is sent to cdn.domain.com it is hitting the CDN at cdn.tempest.netdna.com. So a request for http://cdn.domain.com/style.css is served from the CDN and not your server. The first request for any file will cause the CDN to download the original from your server and then cache it for all future requests.

On your web site you will have to switch out the url's of your content. So instead of thumbnails, for instance, being www.domain.com, they would become cdn.domain.com.

You can also set up caching rules in the CDN admin so that certain types of files that rarely change like css or js are cached by the user and updated only once a day, week, month, year, etc...

Benefits: If your 4 core server is running at perhaps 3.4 load average you can see a reduction of that to something more like 2.7 or less. Why? Because now the only content your server is sending is the index page. It now has more time to process the page instead of also covering requests for the other content. This will give you lower loading times for that index page and the surfer receives their content locally thereby increasing the speed of the entire page.

You only pay for hard drive space if you actually prefer to upload your content to the CDN. I find it easier to just allow the CDN to cache it on its own on its first request for a particular item.

check that. THIS is the best webmaster offer so far online. You should be spamming your ref link man.

I'm trying to figure out the ongoing pricing...

http://www.maxcdn.com/pricing/

So it's $39.95 for the first 1TB (? is this normally per month or also extended to a year?), then $0.07/GB/month ($70/TB/month) above that.

Or you can simply host everything at a provider that offer CDN configs and options and deal with just one company :-)

Although MaxCDN is better than some, it's not NEARLY as simple as some might make it out to be because it, like most CDNs, is severely broken. Their own page proves that because they document how toot have to modify Wordpress in order to ariel around their bugs, how you'd have to modify Vbulletin, Joomla, Drupal, etc. A properly implemented CDN wouldn't have you modifying all of your scripts because it would follow the HTTP standard and therefore "just work". You never notice your ISPs forward CDN because it follows standards. A reverse CDN like MaxCDN would also work transparently if it followed standards. Because it doesn't, they provide instructions for modifying your site to work around the most obvious problems. The less obvious issues are up to you to figure out after you notice them.

Cost vs Convenience...

Yes... You could set up something like Google uses and no need for pesky CNAME's and all of that... No need to modify things for the new cdn.domain.com name... But then most of us don't want to spend $1000 a month...

Pricing... Simple... If you stay on the 1TB model it is until it runs out or 1 year. Nothing is monthly... It is yearly or until the end of the chunk you ordered... Ordering larger chunks of TB's makes it cheaper per TB...

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/maxcdn.com#

Average Load Time for Maxcdn.com

Average (1.516 Seconds), 54% of sites are faster.

Can it work with live streaming? (flash etc)

lol pml, the site above takes ages to download, its stalling on something, then the vids are not being displayed :1orglaugh

I'll stick to my server www.adulthosting.com & css, html & all the other things that make my sites load fast :thumbsup

Visited their site and their own css sheet wouldn't load :/

took 20 seconds to load this page:
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/1118/maxcdn.jpg