CloudFront Migration of Blog Services
September 19th, 2013 by admin
In order to maintain our commitment to upkeep your sites with the highest quality and response time, we are migrating our sites to a content delivery network (CDN). The primary benefit of this move is significantly faster responses for page load time - an important consideration for page ranking by search engines.
The first group of sites to be migrated will be our clients's WordPress blogs. Why the blogs? The underlying PHP codebase on WordPress is fairly inefficient at caching, and blogs receive a heavy amount of traffic from bots. This results in excessive IO usage on our cloud server, and slow response times.
What is a CDN?
From Wikipedia: A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.
What is Amazon CloudFront?
CloudFront is Amazon's web service for content delivery. Among other benefits, CloudFront is fast, simple, cost-effective, elastic, reliable, and global. We wrote some custom code to automate invalidation requests from Subversion, the open source version control system that we use.
What's the bottom line?
Sites that we've optimized and migrated to CloudFront, including the WordPress blogs, typically score a 98+ on Google's Pagespeed Insights, and experience cached load times of 200-500 milliseconds. Oh and they cost us less to operate. So better service to our customers and an improvement to our bottom line.
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