Make Your Site Really Fast With Self Hosted CDN and Google CDN

The load speed of your site is starting to become more and more important in having a good ranking in Google. Lately, I have seen some videos by Matt Cubs which state exactly the same thing. Having a decent load speed of your site is important not only for high ranking in Google but also is very important in making your visitors come back.

I didn’t host my site on a Virtual Private Server because I thought that the price was too high and until I would make some money with my site it had no point. So I have decided to buy a share hosting alternative from IPage instead, paying only 35$ for one year. First, I wasn’t so happy with my site load speed and I decided to search on the Internet for some ways to make my site load speed faster.It took me a while until I was able to find a suitable solution, so I thought it would be helpful to share with you the ways that I have found. My two free ways for making you site load speed very fast is: Self hosted CDN and Google CDN. For sure if you chose to use these ways you’ll see the difference.

Make your site really fast with self hosted CDN

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is the best way to make your site load speed very good. Normally CDN services are not that cheep, it actually takes a lot of money. A normal CDN has more servers spread all over the world and the information is loaded from the closest visitor location. A personal CDN will load the information from a sub domain created buy you. This will help increase your speed because the browsers can not download more the 4 element at once. So, with the help of a self hosted CDN, you can load the info from 2 sources and, in this way, the process will be 2 times faster.

Steps to follow to have a self hosted CDN on a regular site:

• Create a subdomain – go to your hosting provider cpanel and create a new subdomain pointing to a subfolder.
• Move the images, css, js.. in subdomain – the next step is to move the images, css, js,videos to the newly created subdomain. For example, I have created subdomain cdn.bitdoze.com and in this subdomain I have created the images directory and moved the background image ( bg.jpg) in it. To access the image I only have to type the path http://cdn.bitdoze.com/images/bg.jpg.
• Modify the theme – the next and final step is to modify the theme to point to the new location where the files are stored. Just modify the CSS and html codes to load the images and other scripts from the new subdomain.

Steps to follow to have a self hosted CDN on WordPress with W3C Total Cache:

If you are using WordPress then the  job to have a self hosted CDN  will be a lot easier. W3  Total Cache will help you to do this in only several simple steps:

• Create a subdomain – the same as above, go to cpanel and create your subdomain.
• Configure W3 Total Cache – go to CDN configurations and configure the plugin like in the image.
• Upload files to subdomain –  W3TC automatically will upload the files to your subdomain (CDN) and update automatically if new changes appear.

Make your site really fast with Google CDN

Google has the possibility to act like an actual CDN and the best thing is that it is free. By transforming Google in a CDN, you will have the advantage to use their 40 servers in the entire world. I have been using it for a month and the increase of performance can be seen even though I have been using it just for images. Google CDN is ideal for a site that has les the 10.000 visitors a day. I have already written an article about it:Use Google App Engine as a Free CDN to Speed up Your Website. So check my article for help in configuring the Free Google App CDN. In the future more articles about advanced Google CDN configurations and cirux (a program that can help with Google CDN App) will come.

Conclusions

Combining the Google CDN and self hosted CDN can really increase your site load speed. Just consider the benefit of taking advantage of Google’s 40 servers and the fact that your browser will load files from 3 different sources.

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