I'm with (mt) and they're always down, slow, temporarily have errors... I'm sick of it. I basically want to move hosts and stick with them. My highest priorities are speed and uptime. I only need a few gigs of space and bandwidth. I've been doing a fair bit of research and stumbled across CDN's, which apparently makes sites faster as files are fetched from the server closest to the visitor, rather them all from the 1 place on the opposite side of the world for some. Is this true, and what difference (%) wise is it likely to make? I also need a new host, so if someone knows how to find a kickass fast one that'd be great
You are the 2nd person today I've heard say that. You put your static content into the CDN and then the visitor will get the data from the server closest to them, so the better the coverage the CDN has the more chance there is that a visitor gets files from a local server. If someone in Australia is accessing your site they may have a 300ms trip to your server in the US but on a CDN with a node in Australia then they may only have a 30ms trip, it makes a difference for lots of little files. http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html mentions 20% improvement in responsiveness.
That's actually the site that I read which lead me onto CDN's I wanted to see if someone had experience, for instance it may make a 20% difference for yahoo, they're also probably using good servers (which may/may not make it better than other CDN's). Do you know of any decent CDN's? Most of the ones I found look like they have to be contacted via phone, they're aren't little instant deployment type accounts (which is all I want, 5mb tops)
If you have servers through softlayer.com then the offer a CDN, I don't think the offer it on it's own. http://www.simplecdn.com/ I've heard of, not used, but look like limited coverage. http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ again not used. Hope that helps.
Cheers. Yep it's not crash hot (basically only America), but that's all I need - I just purchased an account with an Aussie host which rips for here (40ms ping) given most of my visitors are Aussies, however its around 300-400ms for overseas, so having US/Europe covered and reducing that time for them will mean 90% of my visitors will have a great connection speed, and the other 10% will have average.