Affordable Content Distribution Network Services
Posted by Nathan Kaiser on Tue Feb 24 11:53:00 UTC 2009
Blue Box Group is happy to announce it’s newest addition to our superb line-up of Rails hosting services: Bundled Content Delivery Network Services. We’re proud to offer services and features not found at other providers and designed to make your business operate more smoothly and effectively. We have historically been at the forefront of Rails hosting technology (Carbon Neutral Web Hosting, Ruby on Rails Hosting Service Level Agreement, IPv6 Services) and now we’re one of the first to make a Content Delivery Network an affordable part of every day rails hosting.
So what is a CDN and why does it benefit your business? More than likely, your site has thousands of visitors not only from the US, but from across the world. By caching your site’s static content on both our national and global network of caching servers, your visitors will experience faster load times regardless of location. Powered by Internap’s powerful network backbone, the Blue Box Group CDN will automatically determine the closest content server to each visitor and serve your content from that point. Since electronic information is transmitted at roughly the speed of light (think fiber optics), placing your largest data closer to your end users is the most fundamental way to speed up your site.
Increasing the speed of your site isn’t the only benefit of the Blue Box Group CDN. In addition to bringing your largest files closer to your visitors (typically videos, images, stylesheets and javascripts), many clients will see their server loads remain stable paired with an INCREASE in traffic. Curious how this happens? As your site’s static content gets cached and redistributed around the globe, the CDN begins to serve files from its cache instead of directly from your site. Any request for a piece of content that already exists on the CDN will now be served from the closest server to your customer as opposed to your site’s main server. All of the requests processed by the CDN are requests that your hardware doesn’t have to worry about, freeing up system resources for more important non-cached requests. By moving the burden of serving the hundreds of media files your site has to external hardware, your site will find itself with an increased ability to handle site traffic while seeing a comparably lower server load.
A client of Blue Box Group located in Australia recently decided to utilize the CDN with their content heavy site which had visitors from all over the world. Before utilizing the CDN, this client was experiencing slower response times on some of its pages due to the long distance those images must travel (Washington State to Australia). After configuring their site to use the CDN (less than a few hours work), we saw some pretty exciting results:
As you can see from the above graphs, not only did our client see a dramatic reduction in ping response times to the asset servers after implementing the CDN, but the total amount of traffic that the site was able to serve went up as well. This was largely due to the CDN improving usage of server resources by keeping server resources available for dynamic content. Any site will see some improvement in speed and reliability after utilizing the CDN, plus our platform extremely easy to get started on!
Content Distribution Networks are used by some of the largest internet content providers on the web today: Google, Amazon, Apple and more! Now your site can utilize the same technologies as these internet superstars, at a price anyone can afford. With minimal startup fees and pricing inline with traditional bandwidth rates, there really is no reason to avoid using this type of platform. It’s possible to implement not only for large enterprise clusters, but for shared hosting and virtual and dedicated platforms as well. To get more information about this great opportunity to improve your site’s functionality, give us a call today!
-—Joe Clark
Blue Box Group
