Anyone knows is there any other CDN service which pickup the speed of my website. I only know 2 website which is maxcdn and vps.net, any other ?
Is anyone using CDN on cs-cart. If yes, how you have installled ?
Try www.cloudflare.com
It’s free unless you want other options enabled. I’m with Hostgator and know their shared plan has it as an option as well as with VPS (which is what I’m on) can be enabled by the admins as well.
I’ve successfully integrated both MaxCDN and Akamai with CS-Cart. There are a few ways to do it but whatever you do you are going to need to use the CDN to serve SSL data too. If anyone is interested in more details, I’d be happy to share.
I’d like to read about it, please.
[quote name=‘TonyK’]I’d like to read about it, please.[/QUOTE]
I second that. I would be interested as well.
I will write up a summary later today. Too much going on here right now. I will say that I did extensive testing between multiple CDN’s and the only one that decreased page load speed significantly is Akamai (which my client is live with). MaxCDN is great for offloading static elements but it only reduces page load speed by perhaps 8% whereas Akamai reduces by 60%. Limelight would probably be the same as Akamai.
Hello idg,
Me too, I wait your summary. In fact, I’m VERY interested by your experience!
Thanks for sharing,
Lee Li Pop
Things are real crazy here… right before the frenzy begins.
I was thinking about this post and I thought that before I write up what I did to serve site assets via Akamai and MaxCDN, I should point out that I am not caching the cs-cart generated html as doing so can create a very complicated situation as far as real-time inventory and customers that login. I implemented a CDN solely for the static assests (images, js, css etc.) and with Akamai it cut down a 17 second pageload (first request to last request) to about 5 seconds.
Is anyone still interested in hearing what I did to implement a CDN for site assets?
for a 2nd time, YES!! 
[quote name=‘TonyK’]for a 2nd time, YES!! :-P[/QUOTE]
What he said 
Always interested in anything that is relative…
Definitively YES!
First, on my research between Akamai and MaxCDN.
Note: I used Pingdom to measure page load speeds.
Akamai: With Akamai, their world-wide server network enables the delivery of content from the server closest to the user thus page load speeds are reached that cannot be reached unless you are an Amazon size company. In fact Zappos, uses Akamai. In my tests without Akamai, pages took about 60-65% longer to load than with Akamai. However, Akamai is not focused completely on offloading traffic from your origin. The way it works with Akamai is that each one of their servers will hit your origin for content and cache for whatever time you specify. So you do get a major percentage of traffic offloaded, but their 70,000+ servers will each make requests to your origin for content when the server is hit upon by a user. Overall Akamai is great for increasing total page load speed that you wouldn’t be able to do on your own. However Akamai is expensive for a small business.
MaxCDN: I use MaxCDN for many sites and they are really good. However the way their system works is more in the content offload then fastest speed to the user. They do have multiple nodes and it does speed your site up but not like Akamai. Integrating with MaxCDN shaved off about 1 second on an otherwise 15 second page load. However MaxCDN does offload a larger percentage as once they hit your origin, they spread your content among all their nodes and don’t hit your origin from each node. They are also substantially cheaper. They charge bandwidth plus $299 a month for SSL serving which you need with CS-Cart.
Integration: They way to integrate both Akamai and MaxCDN for serving assets is as follows.
- You need to create a subdomain ie cdn.domain.com.
- In Akamai or MaxCDN you need to setup the subdomain to point to your root cs-cart url www.domain.com. This way when image requests or js requests come in, they hit your server using your cs cart directory structure.
- Edit your tpl files to point assets to the subdomain. There are multiple ways to do this, but the simplest way is to add “//cdn.domain.com” after every instance of src= (by leaving out http you are allowing the browser to switch between http and https connections on the subdomain since cs-cart using one template for both non-secure and secure connections, you need to integrate this way.) I have a whole list of files that need to be changed but I have not compiled it yet into a manner which I can paste it here. I can post it if anyone is interested in implementing this.
The result of this integration is that non-secure assets are pulled from an http location and secure assets are pulled from a secure connection. Both Akamai and MaxCDN will work with you on getting the correct SSL cert for their respective systems.
As I wrote earlier, I integrated a client of mine that averages 30,000 pageviews a day and it has sped up the site tremendously. Before Akamai, the homepage, according to Pingdom was taking 14 seconds to load and with Akamai is averaging 4.3 seconds. Their competition’s sites are loading a drop slower but now they are in the ball-park of their competition’s page load speed.
If anyone is considering doing this integration, respond and I will put together the list of files that need to be modified.
[quote name=‘idg’]First, on my research between Akamai and MaxCDN.
Note: I used Pingdom to measure page load speeds.
Akamai: With Akamai, their world-wide server network enables the delivery of content from the server closest to the user thus page load speeds are reached that cannot be reached unless you are an Amazon size company. In fact Zappos, uses Akamai. In my tests without Akamai, pages took about 60-65% longer to load than with Akamai. However, Akamai is not focused completely on offloading traffic from your origin. The way it works with Akamai is that each one of their servers will hit your origin for content and cache for whatever time you specify. So you do get a major percentage of traffic offloaded, but their 70,000+ servers will each make requests to your origin for content when the server is hit upon by a user. Overall Akamai is great for increasing total page load speed that you wouldn’t be able to do on your own. However Akamai is expensive for a small business.
MaxCDN: I use MaxCDN for many sites and they are really good. However the way their system works is more in the content offload then fastest speed to the user. They do have multiple nodes and it does speed your site up but not like Akamai. Integrating with MaxCDN shaved off about 1 second on an otherwise 15 second page load. However MaxCDN does offload a larger percentage as once they hit your origin, they spread your content among all their nodes and don’t hit your origin from each node. They are also substantially cheaper. They charge bandwidth plus $299 a month for SSL serving which you need with CS-Cart.
Integration: They way to integrate both Akamai and MaxCDN for serving assets is as follows.
- You need to create a subdomain ie cdn.domain.com.
- In Akamai or MaxCDN you need to setup the subdomain to point to your root cs-cart url www.domain.com. This way when image requests or js requests come in, they hit your server using your cs cart directory structure.
- Edit your tpl files to point assets to the subdomain. There are multiple ways to do this, but the simplest way is to add “//cdn.domain.com” after every instance of src= (by leaving out http you are allowing the browser to switch between http and https connections on the subdomain since cs-cart using one template for both non-secure and secure connections, you need to integrate this way.) I have a whole list of files that need to be changed but I have not compiled it yet into a manner which I can paste it here. I can post it if anyone is interested in implementing this.
The result of this integration is that non-secure assets are pulled from an http location and secure assets are pulled from a secure connection. Both Akamai and MaxCDN will work with you on getting the correct SSL cert for their respective systems.
As I wrote earlier, I integrated a client of mine that averages 30,000 pageviews a day and it has sped up the site tremendously. Before Akamai, the homepage, according to Pingdom was taking 14 seconds to load and with Akamai is averaging 4.3 seconds. Their competition’s sites are loading a drop slower but now they are in the ball-park of their competition’s page load speed.
If anyone is considering doing this integration, respond and I will put together the list of files that need to be modified.[/QUOTE]
I am interested, could you please provide the configuration instruction step by step ?
Thank you so much !
Which CDN are you going with? I’m swamped with work currently but I will try to put together the file list that have paths that need to be changed. Also what skin are you using?
[quote name=‘idg’]Which CDN are you going with? I’m swamped with work currently but I will try to put together the file list that have paths that need to be changed. Also what skin are you using?[/QUOTE]
Akamai and Basic Skin.
Please Michael,
[quote name=‘idg’][SIZE=“3”]put together the file list that have paths that need to be changed.[/SIZE][/QUOTE]
Thank you,
Lee Li Pop
[quote name=‘btrials’]Try www.cloudflare.com
It’s free unless you want other options enabled. I’m with Hostgator and know their shared plan has it as an option as well as with VPS (which is what I’m on) can be enabled by the admins as well.[/QUOTE]
I’m not for sure I see anything different yet with the install of cloudflare, but we are giving it a shot. We’ll give it another few days and see if we notice anything. I will say that it was fairly easy to set up and that I did not have to change a ton of code on the site. I should also mention that cloudflare isn’t really a CDN, they claim to be “like” a CDN. So again, I’m not for sure if it will really show any results, but we’ll give it a shot.
@clips - Do you know their basic architecture? Are they like Akami where they have servers scattered all over the world and suck up the content from your store as it’s demanded and where it has not expired? Or do they simply offload this to a server farm somewhere and service all content requests from there?