Why add a CDN to your eCommerce store

MageStack comes with a number of options for going global; using one of our 25 worldwide data-centres or deploying MageStack Edge (for SSL termination, WAF, and Varnish content delivery at the edge). Most providers would stop there, but we wanted to offer just a little more to our customers - we've launched Sonassi CDN!

What is a CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) is a series of servers around the world that serve the content for your website to your customers from a geographically closer location. When your website loads, its going to trigger the download of a lot of content (eg. CSS, JS and images) - and the further the customer is from your website, the greater the potential that it may slow down.

With a CDN, the more locations you have, generally the better you can improve performance for users across the world; Sonassi's CDN offers a whopping 151 locations across the world.

Each of these servers holds a copy of the images, CSS and JS from your website (but no customer or private information); so when a user in Australia visits your site, the content is served from Sydney - not Manchester. The result is significantly improved performance for your overseas customers.


How can a CDN help improve ...

Performance

A common misconception about CDN's is that they will make performance better, period. That's not always quite the case though.

If you've got a quality hosting provider, like Sonassi 😉 - you'll already have phenomenal connectivity across the UK, Europe and the US. Adding a CDN can lead to a minor reduction in performance for your domestic region - but the upside of it is that you'll see a major improvement in global content delivery.

So for your customers in Asia Pacific, the Middle East or South America; they will really see a massive improvement in page load time as the assets from your website are served from a server much closer to them.

Bandwidth Consumption

The biggest benefit of using the Sonassi CDN is that you can reduce your bandwidth utilisation significantly. The longer you set the cache lifetime and the less frequently you flush the cache, the smaller your bandwidth bill will be! There's a point of diminishing returns (no-one wants a 6 month cache!), but setting the cache lifetime to just 1 day can reduce bandwidth by almost 20%, 7 days by 30% and 14 days to a mighty 50%.

Connectivity is the backbone of the internet and that carries a cost; so the less bandwidth you consume, the lower your running costs will be for your website.

Enough already, I'm sold, what's the cost?

Free. 100% free; its yet another amazing feature provided as standard on MageStack.

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