In January of 2011, the third full month after putting this site online, there were roughly 450,000 page views requiring 27GB of bandwidth (i.e., mostly data provided by the server to users). In April of 2011, there were also 450,000 page views, but only 14GB of bandwidth. That’s a dramatic difference: half the bandwidth for virtually the same amount of traffic! This wasn’t a goal of mine (my hosting plan allows for up to 1TB of bandwidth per month), but happens to be a great side benefit of three steps I took, primarily with the aim of improving the site’s performance (i.e., how quickly pages load for visitors). Here’s the full scoop… Continue Reading…
Archives For cdn
In this edition…
- About This Newsletter
- What are You Thinking? => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites”
- On the Web => Two E-Commerce Articles Published Online
- On the Web => Several Excerpts from “Effortless Flex 4 Development”
- On the Web => Toad for MySQL
- On the Blog => Rendering View Files in Yii
- On the Blog => Using Amazon’s CloudFront as a CDN
- Q&A => How Can One Become a “Real” Programmer?
- What is Larry Thinking => Becoming a Better Programmer, Part 2
- Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP for the Web”, “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites”, and More!
Continue Reading…
In October 2010, I revamped my entire Web site, even switching the domain name in the process. The previous, outdated, version of the site was custom built, using a standard template system (i.e., a couple of included files). The site didn’t have too many features, too much content on any one page, and only a smattering of dynamic behavior (a SuckerFish menu being about the most elaborate). The new version of the site uses WordPress as its basis, which means worse performance. Plus, I’m using several plug-ins, and there’s a ton more content on each page. In short, I have a better site in many ways but it performs much more poorly. Thus, I’m embarking on the tedious but valuable process of improving the site’s performance in any way possible. One solution I just embraced is using Amazon’s CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). In this post I explain why I choose CloudFront, how I went about setting it up, and what it’s actually costing me. Continue Reading…
I’m in the process of implementing Amazon’s CloudFront as a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for my site (in order to improve performance). Once I feel comfortable with how it’s working (it seems to be now, but it will take a day or two to fully roll out), I’ll formally write up what I did and why. In the meantime, if you see anything crazy, please let me know.
