CDN (Content Delivery Network) on a small site make sense?

[froggyboy604]

Would using a CDN for a small website make sense?

I read using a CDN can be rather expensive and hard to setup if you're not CDN web savvy.

However, it can speed up a website for clients who live far away from your web server like in Europe, Asia, Africa, etc according to some blogs I read. It can also decrease the bandwidth, and other web server resources for your web hosting account since the CDN will be used to host images, videos, css files, javascript files, and more, so your web server just host your HTML, php,etc.

I certainly won't use a CDN right now because I can't afford it at this point and time, and all my websites get very little traffic. Plus, my sites don't host a lot of big files like images, and videos.

However, Amazon Cloudfront ( http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ ) looks like a good deal for people who need CDNs.

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottleneck near that server.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network

 

[spyka]

Re: CDN (Content Delivery Network) on a small site make sens

I use a CDN for tellymix, at http://tellymixcdn.com

It's not on Amazon, but it's just a different server with all the images and CSS on.

I'm not sure what difference it really makes to speed, but it's definitely far easier to organise everything.

All the files are gzipped, cached, mimised too to reduce load on the server