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How is this different from simply creating a sub-domain on your server for CDN-like functions? For example, Google's "Page Speed, Performance Best Practices" r

How is this different from simply creating a sub-domain on your server for CDN-like functions? For example, Google's "Page Speed, Performance Best Practices" recommends setting up your own sub-domain(s) to serve static content[1]. Yahoo! recommends using a CDN service provider[2], but the general idea of using other domains to serve static content is the same. Also, some static content can be referenced from third-party hosts, such as jQuery on Google Code or Twitter's Bootstrap CSS on GitHub. As an aside, I'm surprised that, seemingly, a large number of web developers have never heard of - or read - the performance best practices from Google or Yahoo!. 1. http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rtt.html#ParallelizeDownloads http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rtt.html#Parall... 2. http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#cdn http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#cdn

LogicX 15y ago
Its different, because it seems you're confusing CDNs with Parallelizing Downloads. These are not one and the same. They're different because the recommendation to create one or more subdomains for static content has two purposes: 1. So that you can exclude some overhead from things like cookies being passed on each request, as its a separate hostname from where the dynamic content loads. 2. So that there are multiple hostnames to download static content from, so web browsers can take advantage of their maximum connections per host setting, to download your static content in parallel. Neither of those points included CDN: Geographically disperse high speed network serving content to your viewers from the nearest CDN server to them. The proposal from the linked article is that they are able to take advantage of a CDN service for free, without having to pay the likes of Amazon Cloudfront.
- 127001brewer 15y ago
  True, which is why I said "CDN-like functions" because, for smaller web applications and websites, having paralleled downloads would increase performance (without having to use a CDN service). Also, what about hosting your static scripts and style sheets on a service like Google Code or GitHub? Would that give you a "CDN-like" performance increase as well? I'm advocating non-CDN services through other techniques that can provide increase performance for smaller web application and websites.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - LogicX 15y ago
    I don't believe any such static host would necessarily improve your performance over your own host or s3. Cloudfront is surprisingly inexpensive, especially for smaller web applications and websites: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ You probably have only a few MBs of static content, cloudfront can be configured to have a cloudfront URL that just fetches from http://yournormalwebsite.com http://yournormalwebsite.com. No S3 bucket involved, no uploading content. Just change your static content URLs to be http://cloudfrontURL/static http://cloudfrontURL/static content. Even with tens of thousands of visitors a month, you'll owe... < $5. Or as suggested elsewhere here, just use cloudflare, which is $0.
entropyneur 15y ago
IIRC the point of using a subdomain is to get rid of cookies so that the server can cache the static content efficiently. This is entirely different. Looks like the trick described in this article lets you "host" your static content on Google's CDN.

LogicX 15y ago

Its different, because it seems you're confusing CDNs with Parallelizing Downloads. These are not one and the same. They're different because the recommendation to create one or more subdomains for static content has two purposes: 1. So that you can exclude some overhead from things like cookies being passed on each request, as its a separate hostname from where the dynamic content loads. 2. So that there are multiple hostnames to download static content from, so web browsers can take advantage of their maximum connections per host setting, to download your static content in parallel. Neither of those points included CDN: Geographically disperse high speed network serving content to your viewers from the nearest CDN server to them. The proposal from the linked article is that they are able to take advantage of a CDN service for free, without having to pay the likes of Amazon Cloudfront.

127001brewer 15y ago
True, which is why I said "CDN-like functions" because, for smaller web applications and websites, having paralleled downloads would increase performance (without having to use a CDN service). Also, what about hosting your static scripts and style sheets on a service like Google Code or GitHub? Would that give you a "CDN-like" performance increase as well? I'm advocating non-CDN services through other techniques that can provide increase performance for smaller web application and websites.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- LogicX 15y ago
  I don't believe any such static host would necessarily improve your performance over your own host or s3. Cloudfront is surprisingly inexpensive, especially for smaller web applications and websites: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ You probably have only a few MBs of static content, cloudfront can be configured to have a cloudfront URL that just fetches from http://yournormalwebsite.com http://yournormalwebsite.com. No S3 bucket involved, no uploading content. Just change your static content URLs to be http://cloudfrontURL/static http://cloudfrontURL/static content. Even with tens of thousands of visitors a month, you'll owe... < $5. Or as suggested elsewhere here, just use cloudflare, which is $0.

entropyneur 15y ago

IIRC the point of using a subdomain is to get rid of cookies so that the server can cache the static content efficiently. This is entirely different. Looks like the trick described in this article lets you "host" your static content on Google's CDN.