Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the release of my latest plugin, CDN

http://www.ultranerds.com/...inks_3_0_x/CDN_L283/

This plugin will basically let you run a Content Delivery Network on your site, which in turn speeds up the time your pages take to load for your users.

The MaxCDN service isn't free (its currently $40, for 1 terrabyte of data, which is a LOT! ... and then $10/month for the "disk space" your files use, which again - is bearable, considering the advantages this system has)

If anyone would like to try it out using my account, please let me know. Obviously it would only be for a day, just so you can see the advantages of it (otherwise I will be using all my bandwidth up ) ... but it should give you some idea as to the amount of speed difference this system would make to your site.

Please let me know if you have any questions

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

OK, I decided to give it a try and see what happens. At least you'll get some commission and I can see if it's worth doing or not (for my site any way).

Thanks.

Nice

Have you set it up yet? Made much of a difference? For the sites I've set it up on so far, its knocked on average around 40% of the load time off - which is pretty darn cool

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

What are you using to compare? gtmetrix?

Yeah

Although, I've found it better to use Google Webmasters to get a better idea of how much its speeded up (as that takes data from "real" users who access your site, and how long it takes for pages to load)

Unfortunatly, GWebmaster doesn't update that often - so it can sometimes be a couple of weeks before you see the changes

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

Well at the moment I'm up 1%.

Old:
Page Speed Grade 95% A
YSlow Grade 89% B

New:
Page Speed Grade 95% A
YSlow Grade 90% A

What is the time difference though? Its not so much the % score (you have to manually setup the CDN in your settings on GTMetrix) .. otherwise it doesn't know you are using a CDN, and will knock you down with your score for that

Its the time you should see a big difference in

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

Yes I've added the CDN to the settings. My time has gone from 1.27 to 1.09.

Edit: 1.47 to 1.29.

Ah ok - not as much as I would have expected. Can you send me a link to the GTMetrix page? May be able to find a few other bits you can do to tweak it more

EDIT: Do you have compression setup on the files from the CDN? That makes quite a bit of difference, as it compresses the files via mod_gzip :)

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

Yes compression is enabled. I'll PM you the link.

I thought it was pretty good result already so maybe it won't change much because it hasn't much further to go?

Just checked it again. YSlow rating has gone down to 85% from 90% but load time has increased (decreased) to 1.05 from 1.29.

Thats most likely due to the adverts you have on the site (Adsense). I got rid of them on some of my sites, and replaced with proper image ads (which are fully optimized)

The problem with google, is that they havn't fully optimized their code, so for an "image" (or flash) ad, it can add a good 1second+ on the overall page load time.

I bet if you removed them, you would be amazed at the difference in speed (just to proove a point - not suggesting you actually do remove them - as thats obviously a good little income if people click )

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

Yes. If I remove the ads it returns: Page Speed Grade: 98% A / YSlow Grade: 96% A but the page load time goes up to 1.97.

I think I'll leave it as it is now (inc ads) as I think my scores are pretty respectable.

Yeah your score is good - be interesting to see what you page load time is like if you use google webmaster :)

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

I do have access to it I think. Is it in the Labs / Site Performance tab?

Hi,

Yup, thats the one. It probably won't help too much now - but in a couple of weeks, take a look and see what the page speed is down to :) (take note of when the CDN change was made as well - so you can see what happened )

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

Here's yesterdays result:


I'll check it again in a few weeks and report back.

Ok sounds good

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

Hi Andy,

works great, thank you very much for that recommendation!
I have been working with MaxCDN and your Plugin now for two days and got total load time of the page from 3.05s to 2.30s.
I did some minor changes with GTMetrix as well (great tool from GT btw) .

Did not spend too much time but feels like a lot of improvement.

Regards

Niko

Hi,

Thanks ... glad its working well for you

Yeah, GT Metrix is a great tool, certainly has helped me with a few sites when optimizing them (ultranerds used to take 3-4 seconds to load, and its only .78 seconds now :))

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

Well the latest results aren't good:



That's another 1% slower than 3 weeks ago. I don't think that CDN is really working for me.

That's not a big of a difference to be able to say it's due to using a CDN. Hell, even GTmetrix's varies between 1.5 to 2.0 seconds over a few months without any significant changes to the site. Since that site performance data google collects is from the google toolbar, the times can vary a bit.

Adrian

Yeah, give it a bit more time - its not gonna happen overnight .... who hosts your site btw?

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

http://www.dewahost.com/

Hi,

Ah ok :) Was gonna say , if you were with GT Hosting, then you wouldn't notice a "huge" difference, as the GTMetrix servers are pretty much next door (as far as I know) ... so the amount of time it takes to get a file is much quicker than a "normal" person

As Adrain said - leave it a bit longer and see what happens. I *very* much doubt your site has got slower due to using a CDN

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

It is theoretically possible Andy...

For example, MaxCDN currently don't have any POPs in Australia or SE Asia. If we started using them with our site (hosted in Australia) we would probably notice added latency locally, versus serving the same static content from our web server.

We use Softlayer CDN (Internap) for our site as it is reasonably priced and has a good spread of POPs. If we had unlimited funds we'd use Akamai but Softlayer works well for us.

True, but thats assuming all your traffic is coming from the source of the server ;)

For example - most of mine comes from Europe, USA, and Canada .... and bit in India, Russia and other places. For them to get the best speed, they need to be as close to it as possible (considering my server is based in the Canda )

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

I've ditched it because it was an absolute pain.

I couldn't work on my site as I had to wait for everything to load. I couldn't alter any CSS without having to log in to CDN and purge the cache before changes would appear and it messed up all my CSS as in the way things were laid out on the page (and no, it's not a browser issue or bad coding).

What's the point in someone on the other side of the world having a page load 0.2 seconds faster while at my end it's like being back on dial-up again?

I now have 998.17GB of bandwidth left that I will never use and money spent that I will never recover.

What a waste of time that was.

Hi,


Sorry, what was the problem? If you wanted to edit the CSS or any other part of it, all you needed to do was disable that part in your plugin settings (i.e disable images, JS and CSS), and then it would all stay like it is normally. Then once you have made the changes and are happy, you would just re-enable them again (and make sure you clear the cache, so all your changes are uploaded).

How do you mean it "messed up your pages" ... anything specific? I don't see any reason what-so-ever that a CDN would cause it to "break" your pages.


So your saying its SLOWER for you to load the page, compared to normal? I'm not sure why that would be the case. You could always email their support guys and get them to do some diagnotics to see whats going on.

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

In the luna CSS li primarynav stacked instead of displaying horizontally. span float left or right just floated everything to the left. width 100% only covered the width of the text, not the table. As soon as I disabled it everything went back to normal.


Yes. All my none CDN code loaded instantly and then in the address bar it constantly displayed "loading (or waiting for) mywebsite.myaccount.netdna-cdn.com" until the page finally loaded.

Pages load fine without it and since disabling it my page speed has actually got quicker according to Google Labs.

I'm not saying that it's a bad thing but it just doesn't work for me that's all.

Hi,


Would you mind re-enabling the plugin, and taking a screenshot both with + without the plugin enabled, so I can see exactly what you mean? If its a bug with the luna template stuff & the CSS, I need to really look into a fix, as lots of peope use it :)


Are you sure it wasn't just the first time you were reloading, after clearing the cache? Remember, after every clear of the cache, the "pull zone" has to re-grab the file from your server. So it does:

1) Check if the file exists on the pull server
2) If not, then grab it from your server
3) Return thefile to you, for viewing

(so step 2 will *only* get run 1 time per clean, so shouldn't cause any real slowdowns generally)

BTW, what country are you in? I'll check to see what kinda servers they have around your location (going back to what Dave said a couple of posts ago)

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

No point. I've rewritten the CSS and removed the li primarynav.


No, it was permanent.

I appreciate that you're trying to help but to be honest I've spent far too much time on this and won't be using it again.

Thanks anyway.

Hi,

Ok NP - I'll have a go with it at some point, and see if I can replicate the problem

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!

Just as an aside - you don't need to manually purge the CDN every time you make changes. If you add a parameter to the stylesheet URL you can update this in the template and force the CDN to get the new version e.g.


On our site we just cycle through the letters on the end and change the numbers each time we run through the alphabet - works for us .

nice

I have to say at first when Andy mentioned this maxcdn site a little while back I didn't believe him, that a CDN could help a site much. But, I have always looked into speeding up my site and in fact when I came across the new gt site gtmetrix.com some of my pages, where over 90% already, since I would do about 80% of the suggested stuff on that site.

But since using the cdn a little over a month ago today. My traffic has looked like apple's stock over the last few years. So either something magically happened or the cdn is helping a lot. Whast also crazy is looking at stats at alexa... my search engine traffic is actually DROPPING, yet traffic is going up.

I think that using both maxcdn.com, and gtmetrix.com. along with andys maxcdn plugins, which made it pretty easy to modify the code on my gt forum and gt links.

I was also concerned on how to set it up, because i tried to use a "cloud" before and it was difficult. Using maxcdn, you can setup a cname such as cdn.yoursite-dotcom that then points to the domain that maxcdn supplies you when you create a zone. so you don't have to load any files they grab them from your site. You might just need to purge them if you change them.

If you think about it. I went from using one server in texas, to using 7 servers spread around the country. Yesterday I had 100% cache files served. Meaning that for most my css, images, js files my server didnt have to do a thing. whats also happening is now pages are loaded faster..

Think about when you hit a slow site.. and slow is a sec or longer these days... you leave and look for another.

I just hope now that gtmetrix.com is out GT will focus a little on letting us get a copy of the new forums.


Just wanted to thank Andy, maxcdn, and gtmetrix.com.

You could always go the old fashion way, and insert your CSS in the page until you have it right. Then make it external. Also depending on your server and site.. it's not (page load 0.2 seconds faster) It's more like 1-2 seconds faster.

If you need any help let me know.

Glad its working well for you

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

---

Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!