May I use CDN for whole website (PHP, Apache, MySQL) or just for images and CSS, JS files

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May I use CDN for whole website (PHP, Apache, MySQL) or just for images and CSS, JS files?

What's the best choice > cloud-hosting or dedicated-hosting? Does CDN has that support?

Witch hosting you suggest me the best – the fastest, stablest 100% uptime, CDN, not expensive at all?

Best Answer

You've got three questions in one here, so let's take them in the order you asked:

Typically, you would use a CDN for serving static assets such as Images/CSS/JS.
CDN and Cloud/Static are not the same thing. With CDN, you provide the CDN your assets and they take care of the rest. Cloud/Static are used for dynamic content and you would configure things yourself.
It all depends on your requirements and application. There's really no such thing as 100% uptime, it just won't happen. You can, however, come very close. I would recommend Amazon, their Cloudfront offering is downright cheap and their new Free Tier for EC2 (cloud servers) is hard to pass up...

Related Solutions

CDN – When Does a Content Delivery Network Become Worth It

At what point is it worth adding a CDN (content delivery network) to your website?

When one of the following occurs:

You're reaching a large, international audience. Careful analysis of your audience shows that many of them are 100 - 300ms Round Trip Time (RTT) away. You do the math, and discover that a large group of you customers are getting a somewhat slow site, due to TCP/IP's so-so performance on links with high bandwidth delay product.
You find that you have a lots of requests for mostly static files, i.e. streaming video, audio, PDFs, images etc. In fact, there are so many requests per second that it can't easily be handled by just setting up 2, 3, 4 or more servers dedicated to static file serving.
You're a tech geek, and you set up a site using Amazon Cloudfront or Cachefly just for the fun of it. Don't feel bad, I have done it too.

I have repeatedly seen articles where SimpleCDN didn't do so great. It is really hard to objectively quantify the performance of the various CDNs, but here is one attempt. Maybe I'm being unfair to SimpleCDN here, but they wouldn't be my first choice.

Amazon Cloudfront is pretty consistenly good ... not great, but cheap and easy to get started with.

Edit: Akamai still seems to be the very best CDN, expensive but so worth it. See SmugMugs recent presentation, slide 7 in the PDF or the more detailed version in the video. I have never worked with Akamai, I have always dismissed them as obviously too expensive for the sites I have worked on. Maybe that is beginning to change, I don't know, but they are trying to lower the barrier to entry to their CDN service.

Using CDN to serve images folder for PHP/Apache website

CDNs operate in a way then when a DNS lookup is made, it returns the closest (i.e. fastest) server to the users location. That's why you will find, for example:

http://www.example.com/ = website
http://images.example.com/something.jpg = CDN with images

You'll need to have a different (CDN'd) hostname for your images, I'm afraid.

If you use Apache's mod_substitute, you should be able to replace the images with ones on such a CDN domain so you don't have to make any PHP changes.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

CDN – When Does a Content Delivery Network Become Worth It

Using CDN to serve images folder for PHP/Apache website

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