Blog homeThis week I have been reading up on Yahoo’s information about improving website performance. They have a useful section within their developer network about exceptional performance. This page should be in most web developers bookmarks, especially those on high trafficked websites or those with many images, videos etc.
I have also been spending some time playing with YSlow, a Firefox add-on, that can look at individual websites and determine whether they are compliant with Yahoo’s website performance rules.
YSlow works with Firebug….. I like Firebug as it can produce nice little outputs like below - showing you all the elements of a page as they download - and this helps determine which are fast and which need optimisation. It is also very good at looking at source code of other people’s websites…. if you are into that kind of thing.
Anyway, back to the rules….One of Yahoo’s suggestions is to improve how your hosting is setup.
When you choose where you are going to host your website people conventionally consider the following:
- Price - You can run a website on £100 per year (200 USD) - or £500 (1000 USD) a year - or, if you are a large dot com, you can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds per year just on hosting.
- Technical support level - the price of hosting tends to reflect the support level - is it 24×7 or office hours only. Will they proactively look to solve problems - or just ensure that there is Internet connectivity to your hosting and let you sort out your own issues?
- Legal jurisdiction - with some kinds of data there are issues moving it between the US and Europe etc…. and the jurisdiction of your hosting provider can make a difference - if you are storing or transferring personal data (such as booking information) via your website.
- Central bandwidth connection - people tend to want hosting to be at the centre of the Internet (or near the main traffic hubs - like London, West Coast USA etc)
One issue with being hosted at the centre of the Internet is that, for example, say you are hosting in London - your US visitors will all experience a “slowdown” of your website as all the traffic (for each element of your web page) has to transfer from the UK to the US on every web page request. Likewise, Australian users will have their traffic going all around the world to them - on every page request.
This can be slow however many web developers have just said “well that is how the Internet is” and left this problem for another day.
Is there an alternative to using centrally connected web hosting?
Instead of hosting centrally - you can move some of your hosting “to the edge of the Internet”. For example, you can move your images, videos, flash, CSS and JavaScript to Australia, the UK and the US. Australian users will download their content from your Australian servers, your US users will download from a US server and your UK users from a UK server….. however they will all have the same content URLs….. and all of this server switching happens behind the scenes.
The networks that support this kind of hosting are called Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). You can see a nice demo of one of these networks at CacheFly’s demo - complete with pretty pictures and cheesy US accent.
Yikes - that sounds expensive…. but actually it isn’t. CacheFly have a plan that starts at USD 15 per month. Other companies like Amazon S3 are also reasonably well priced (although Amazon is not quite the same concept as a CDN). You can find a full list of CDNs on this website
Back to travel for a second - I have worked with many leading travel dot coms - and I can’t think of a single one that uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN). That strikes me as odd especially as there are, on the larger websites, thousands and thousands of images that could really be sped up by using a CDN.
However, I think in the next few years, this will change. Most international websites will be using the services of a CDN - or conventional hosting companies will start to support “CDN directories” - so you can divide your website into sections - those files that are centrally hosted (like script files that generate the HTML) and those files that are distributed onto CDNs automatically (like JavaScript, CSS, Flash, images, videos, documents etc)
Hosting, which has recently become a commodity that people don’t really think about much, has just become a lot more interesting.
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