Everyone knows that YouTube has a bazillion servers. CNN has an army of them. Amazon’s AWS cloud hosting pops up on tons of sites, and boasts an array of thousands of PCs linked together as database servers. What’s a small website operator to do when there’s no budget for fancy but there’s a need for speed? The answer is CacheFly, incredibly fast file hosting for the rest of us. Officially called a CDN, for Content Delivery Network, CacheFly gives you an FTP account and provides a static link that will deliver your content from one of their very fast servers around the globe. There’s a 30 day trial to get you started, and then the basic plan gives you 300MB of storage for $15 a month. That’s enough storage to host all the images and videos on most blogs and e-commerce sites, and they’re dynamically load balanced across the globe. If you have a lot of customers in Australia, they’ll get the Australian server for your media, and so forth. Other companies like Akamai, EdgeCast, and Limelight won’t even give you pricing on their pages, and are geared toward the large sites with big budgets.
But how do you test how fast your website actually was or is? That’s where Pingdom comes in. They have free tools that will create reports with your website load time down to a tenth of a second, and break it down into each individual element of your page. (There’s also paid services for monitoring your uptime if you’re a sysadmin.) Run a Pingdom load time test before you remap your images to CacheFly, and then run it after. I cut page load times by a third as soon as I switched the image links to CacheFly. In the e-commerce game, load times can make or break a customer’s experience. Even if your site isn’t mission critical, it’s worth a look to see how easy it is to make your site faster, for a small pile of cash.
