CDN
CDN Providers
Perfect resource for choosing the right CDN provider is CDN Planet site.
Checklist to Find the Best CDN Solution CDN comparison Cedexis - Real time data for real time decisions
CloudHarmony is a paid site for comparasion of cloud services.
Incapsula
Incapsula has a Zurich data center, but in their free plan there is no support for SSL traffic. For monthly fee of $19 per site - there is supports SSL. Incapsula is a similar type of CDN as Cloudflare is.
Incapsula Review: Block Semalt and Protect WordPress Login Page
CacheFly
CacheFly CDN is really very fast as it also has Zurich (Equinox) data center, but costs $99/month, which is way too expensive.
Amazon CloudFront
Believe it or not, Amazon’s CloudFront doesn’t have Swiss locations. It is still considered one of the best CDN’s out there.
March 2014: Amazon’s Cloudfront has just added custom SSL for no extra charge using “SNI Custom SSL”: Custom SSL Certificates
Azure Storage CDN
Cloud Services – Content Delivery Network (CDN) | Microsoft Azure
Azure CDN has it all, pay as you go, and extremely fast. But, today, at may 2015, doesn’t support SSL using custom domain (SNI SSL) - but they are working on it.
I set-up everything normally with this tutorial: Azure CDN and WordPress W3 Total Cache
Data:
Container: http://az759635.vo.msecnd.net/
CNAME: cdn-ms.save-up.ch
Free CDN offers
There is really no free CDN providers, except maybe Cloudflare, but they are not real CDN.
Sources & articles
- 10 Best Free CDN Services to Speed Up Your Website
- 5 Free CDN to Speed Up Your Website
- 10 Free CDN Services to Speed Up WordPress - WPExplorer
Really good comparisons:
Top CDN Services to Make Your WordPress Site Blazingly Fast (and More Reliable) - WPMU DEV Finding the right CDN for our startup - MaxCDN,… - Robin Orheden The Best CDN Provider: CloudFlare vs Incapsula vs MaxCDN
KeyCDN
KeyCDN seems to be a Switzerland company.
SNI custom SSL is free of charge if you bring your certificate: Free Custom SSL for your CDN
KeyCDN, a leading European pure-play CDN, recently used OnApp. After some time they discarded the platform, and decided to go with Nginx.
- The first 5 zones (well, 10) are included, additional zones cost $1 per month
- Minimal credit $25 and credits you buy do not expire.
- Really beautiful and functional Control Panel
Best features of them all!
WordPress CDN Integration with W3 Total Cache
XCDN
XCDN is the only CDN that uses Akamai network. Akamai is considered to be the best and one of the oldest networks. XCDN is a pay as you go, in contrast to original Akamai.
Jason Read, the CEO of CloudHarmony, answered a question on Quora
In terms of features and performance, Akamai clearly rules the CDN market
Jason Read’s answer to Which is better: Amazon S3 or Akamai?
MaxCDN
Disadvantage with MaxCDN’s basic package is their limit of two pull zones.
CDNify
CDNify was also based on OnApp’s CDN-in-a-box, but switched to an in-house platform around middle of 2014 (CDNify launch their own network ).
Has free Custom SSL and up to 10 domains per $10.
- Custom SSL at no additional charge
What I like most about CDNify is not being charged for, or restricted to, the number of pull zones used with your bandwidth.
Amazon Cloudfront
Doesn’t have Swiss POP, according to their server list.
Still, it is highly performant in all the tests.
Note: Amazon CloudFront charges for cache-purges.
How To Use Amazon S3 And Cloudfront With WordPress The Easiest Way to Set Up Amazon Cloudfront in WordPress with W3 Total Cache
Setup SNI custom SSL:
CloudFront Custom SSL (SNI How-To) Setting Up SSL on AWS CloudFront and S3
Based on OnApp
Yes there are a bunch of different CDN platforms out there like CDNsun.com, CDN.net, CDN77, and the list goes, but they’re all based on one network: OnApp.
CDN77 was, probably in past, customer of OnApp.
CDNsun
Their HQ is in Czech Republic. Also based on OnApp, so they could have Swiss POP.
Features: Pay As You Go (PAYG) pricing, free shared SSL but not Custom SNI SSL ($29/yr), no monthly fee. Number of websites: 10 Head start: 15 days free trial
CDN.net
- Pricing: $5 for 100GB/month, no monthly fee
- Features: unlimited number of sites (zones), free shared SSL (not SNI custom SSL), 170 locations (POPs)
- Incentives: 30 days free trial (up to 1TB traffic)
Has POP location in Zurich: OnApp, and when I asked, they told me they can include it in my offering.
Minimal pre-payment is 10$, which is great, but it is a monthly payment
- very fraudulent business practice.
CDN.NET Configuration with W3 Total Cache Wordpress CDN
By reading comments, I figured it out that rtcamp.com is using CDN.NET in Asia.
I also tested the performace of CDN.net, but they seemed a much slower than CDN77.
CDN77.com
- Pricing - $5 for 100GB/month ($49/TB)
- Free Custom SSL
- Incentives: 14 days free trial
Problem: 99$ per year (or max 18 months) is minimal prepayment.
Self-hosted CDN
A self-hosted CDN is one that you create for the purpose of serving up your static content using parallel connections. It will be obsolete HTTP/2.
Get a Faster Site with Self Hosted CDN, WordPress & W3 Total Cache How to Implement Self-Hosted CDN for Site Speed
You have to set cookie domain in Wordpress.
Also, if using Google Analytics, you’ll also explicitly state which domain to set cookies.
Source: How to setup the subdomain
Get a Faster Site with Self Hosted CDN, WordPress & W3 Total Cache
Similar effects as CDN can be achieved with:
- WP Parallel Loading System
- Domain sharding
Parallelize downloads across hostnames | GTmetrix
No need to use domain sharding with SPDY: Using CloudFlare to mix domain sharding and SPDY
Cloudflare
To find out from which server your domain is served, examine result of this page:
curl -s https://www.hostingtipp.ch/cdn-cgi/trace | grep -i colo
For a list of network locations and their abbreviations look at the original article.
Setting up Cloudflare properly
Articles & sources:
Cloudflare problems
Just the fact that it’ll randomly claim your site is offline and show a cloud flare page. It does that a lot, it’s widely reported. Their setup is great if you’re being DDos’d. It’s absolute crap the rest of the time. Turn it off for a week and watch your traffic increase.
Setting CDN expires header
Cache-control headers are the same as sent from origin server - our server. This is how CDN77 and most of CDN providers operate. Some, more advanced CDN providers, give you a choice to choose if you want their server to set expire headers, or to pass headers from origin. This is how KeyCDN behaves.
How to compare CDN speed?
I tested the following CDN’s:
- cdn.save-up.ch (KeyCDN) - SNI custom SSL support
- cdn77.save-up.ch (CDN77) - for SNI custom SSL you need to prepay 99$/yr
- cdn-ms.save-up.ch (Azure) - no custom SSL support
- cdna.save-up.ch (Amazon) - not tested. More expensive than
Cedexis Stats per country CloudHarmony Compare the speed of two websites in 5 seconds
Detect CDN for a site
Wordpress CDN plugins
The simplest plugin (microplugin) which I like the most is dannyvankooten/wp-cdn-loader
CDN URL rewriting plugin for WordPress ■ Danny van Kooten
Better CDN with ob_start
JasonGiedymin/CDN-Rewrites-Redux WordPress › Free CDN « WordPress Plugins
A way to change image urls in post to cdn image url? - WordPress Development Stack Exchange
function replace_content($content) { $content = str_replace(’###replaceme###’, ‘something_else’,$content); return $content; } add_filter(’the_content’,‘replace_content’);
$string2 = preg_replace("~src=’[’]~e", ‘“src='” . convert_url("$1") . “'”’, $string);
Playing Nice with the “the_content” Filter - Pippins Plugins
Plugin API/Filter Reference « WordPress Codex
CDN Business Model Recap - CDN, Cloud Security, Telecom | Bizety