Quote:
Originally Posted by Tempest
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..  |
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.