The Yahoo! exceptional performance team has released a series of best practice rules for making your site perform significantly faster. Fortunately, the majority of fixes can be handled by any developer. #2 however seems a bit outside the budget of most developers… until now
2: Use a Content Delivery Network
Let’s say you have a small site that has a very local audience. Sally down the street doesn’t notice any problems with slow images. But what if your site is more global? Will the Sally equivalent in Europe, Asia, India, or the other side of the country have the same experience? Probably not. This is why large sites use the Akamai servers. They can cache images and files closer to the user.
The #2 rule by the exceptional performance team tells us to use one of these distributed asset servers.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen.
Some large Internet companies own their own CDN, but it’s cost-effective to use a CDN service provider, such as Akamai Technologies, Mirror Image Internet, or Limelight Networks. For start-up companies and private web sites, the cost of a CDN service can be prohibitive, but as your target audience grows larger and becomes more global, a CDN is necessary to achieve fast response times. 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.
Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site
Doing this cheaply with Amazon
Amazon’s Web Services give you this functionality for a very low cost. There S3 service costs most people less than $5/month. This gives you easy acces to your private database and storage. You pay by the size of your files and the total traffic.
You can further increase your site’s performance by taking advantage of the hosted Yahoo! YUI CSS and JavaScript libraries.
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