"Distributed Hosting" Or Cloud hosting....

[pioneer_1]

We currently co-locate our web sites and our main site with iWeb. They are located in Canada. Our offices are in Florida. My question is how can I distribute my main site thus making it perform better. I called Akamai about this issue and of course they want 2500 a month. I think that is crazy. We are not there yet, however we do need some solution that makes financial sense. So, any help on the issue would be great.

Thanks so much,

[dhuelsmann]

I believe you are looking for a Content Delivery Network (CDN). You can try Cloudflare's free service initially https://www.cloudflare.com/ and then move to paid as your needs grow. MaxCDN which has a free trial is another possibility. https://www.maxcdn.com/

[FlashRebel]

Check digitalocean.com if you can set up server yourself. If not you can check cloudways.com - its managed service available for digitalcoean and also amazon web service.
Digital ocean offers servers in Europe, USA ... for affordable price, really cheap for that power. I use it and its amazing.
For DNS I use cloudflare.com - free and speed like many paid services. I don't recommend use they ''performance and security'' did not find any advantage of it, while u using good cloud server and its set up well. For DNS it helps, its faster than throw your domain registrar.

[pioneer_1]

Thanks! I will check all of them out right now....

I really need to speed up our site.

[Forsh]

I used to use imountain cloud hosting and loved it. When my site started getting tons of traffic daily it could handle to the load no problem.

[pioneer_1]

I was ready to use cloudflare.com but I noticed that they have an issue with "FREE" SSL issues. It takes 24 hours for that to propagate. Since we have 2 SSL certs, we will need to purchase the plan. I asked them if both certs will go live right away. If so, its certainly worth the 20 a month for the service. Ill know soon and post the results.

[FlashRebel]

Don't forget that cloudflare its not solution for everything. First of all you need quality server/hosting. CDN, secutiry, cache are additional steps.
Also check from where are your visitors. If you have visitors in USA, its not the best to host web in Canada. Try to keep your hosting close to your visitors.

[pioneer_1]

The problem we have is that because we have -2- SSL certs we need to have the "Enterprise" version of the cloudflare.com service. They are working out the details for us just to add another cert to the business class service. Its all about the certs!

[FlashRebel]

Test it first, dont expect that cloudflare will boost your site dramaticaly. It helps you if your server is underpowered. If its your sitution still no any cdn will fix your probelm, first you need quality server/hosting.
Btw. cloudflare its not CDN exactly how other companies ... it works little bit different.

[pioneer_1]

Thanks for the excellent advice. Which CDN would you prefer on a large e-commerce site like ours?

[pioneer_1]

We actually installed MaxCDN.com for our caching. There is a Joomla plugin http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions ... bGEiO30%3D

This is the NoNumber Extension that we are using. All is going well. It works with our SSL pages. I would assume that as more time goes by our caching will get better as more and more people hit the site from different areas.
So far we are happy with the integration.

[FlashRebel]

Popular is MaxCDN how dhuelsmann mentioned above. You can check also Rackspace or Amazon service or maybe Microsoft Azure.
Btw. if you monitor or measure somehow your website, maybe after all is done, you can write what is difference and how it helps to your website.

[pioneer_1]

I really appreciate your help so you know.
Maxcdn.com has a very cool control panel which shows you live what is being cached and which pages, etc. I like the live part. Its like Google Analytics. We will monitor this over the next few months to see the actual increase. So far the pages are about 75% faster. Again, we are really happy with this integration. Easy with the Nonumber Joomla extension.

[FlashRebel]

Yes, from first seeing I prefer Maxcdn also. If I work with something, I prefer nice simply and modern design, not like your website

[pioneer_1]

Thanks....lol I have a problem now with my robots.txt file. Maxcdn has seo settings as in just 2. Coninical Header enabled or not and robots.txt enabled or not in the pull zone settings. I messed around with both of them but I am still getting the same errors on feedthebot.com. it showing errors with my robots.txt file. I dont know what to do. It also seems their support doesnt know either.....

[pioneer_1]

MaxCDN really has great support. I must say however they must try to get their crap together when it comes to indexing important SEO files like IMAGES... lol I had to turn off the plugin. As soon as we did our Alexa.Com ranks started going the other way. The right way...

So, I say this to all. MAXCDN is great however be wary of your SEO and your Indexing of your image files. I had to make this post to make everyone aware of this before choosing a CDN.

I hope I have helped....

[FlashRebel]

What's wrong with seo of images there ?

[pioneer_1]

Cannot index images with the CDN on....