CDN – When Does a Content Delivery Network Become Worth It

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At what point is it worth adding a CDN (content delivery network) to your website? Does it make sense to use it for a relatively low traffic website that's a web application? The clients are all over the USA.

Will a CDN even offer a noticeable difference to the end user for my scenario or does it only show effectiveness once you truly have hit scalability levels?

Edit: Information about server setup, currently it's a single ASP.NET instance on a shared hosting environment. What would go into the CDN would be some image files, jquery related files (I know google provides a CDN for the core), css files, and probably some moderate size PDF files.

Best Answer

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

When one of the following occurs:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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