CDN, use of it and recommendations

[MockoB]

Is there anyone using CDN? I just saw the hosting company I am considering are offering free clowdways CDN. I know theoretically it is great solution for speed and fast delivery of static content but I would like to hear someone who actually has experience with it. I saw there is module which is solving issues with CDN and non multi domain SSL certificates. Are there any issues with CDN and single domain certificates? Do you have any suggestions of properly setting clowdways CDN or any other provider which you think is better to choose?

[rubben1985]

Hi, not using Tb yet, but stackpath works fine in my PS installation so It should work too :) No problem here with single domain SSL certificate and their support is amazing and fast. Settings in prestashop it is just fill 1 field.

[MockoB]

May be because you just filled one field you don't have issues with single domain ssl certificate i suppose. But I just saw their pricing !?! Is it reasonable to pay more for cdn than managed vps host per month? Do you have any observations before and after using their services? Is there huge difference between loading times and is your site international, and is there any use of it if you target local market where your hosting server is?

[moy2010]

I honestly don't recommend it. Better go for HTTP2 and don't pay for a feature that isn't future proof.

[MockoB]

The hosting company offer http2, at least I saw it for their shared service but I believe they do for vps also. Why not use combination of both, everywhere I read (not particularly for ps or tb) everyone recommend the use of cdn? Are there any known issues and troubles with it you know about?

[lesley]

How big is your market? Where is your target audience? A CDN is a very low level optimization and over used in my opinion. We use them with clients, but only under certain circumstances, which I do not feel come into play here.

[MockoB]

It's not that big and it would be local market not world wide, hosting server will be located in the same country. But the reason I'm asking is because every site speed metrix recommend cdn and theoretically it sounds logical. Needed to know if someone is using it successfully with thirty bees. Because many features in ps doesn't work like advertised, like caching systems for example and I don't want to fight with another dead before was born feature again :)

[lesley]

I would not heed their recommendations, they are made blindly to sell you on getting a CDN. They aren't using any actual loading metric to see if you need one. The CDN feature works fine in thirty bees, I have tested it myself. The only time we recommend using them though is to prevent port saturation, which is rare for most sites.

[MockoB]

Thanks @lesley one thing less to worry about!

[Guest]

@mockob I'd agree with Lesley, if your target audience is local market then just make sure your hosting is near them and don't bother with a CDN. I've used a CDN on Magento sites in the past and I personally find them a pain because for any updates you make to images, css, js or other static content you've got to make sure you refresh it to the CDN as well.

Aside from protecting you from DDOS attacks and taking load from your server they don't really offer much benefit for the hassle they can give. If you're getting that many visitors then you're probably going to need a dedicated server anyhow and your hosting company should be able to manage bad traffic.

Another downside is image searches in that if you get the CDN set up wrong then you can lose traffic to your website from people getting there via image searches but instead getting the images from the CDN. You've got to make sure your images are indexed via Google and have proper redirects in place so you don't lose that traffic. TBH I'm no expert here and most users aren't so it can be very easy to get this wrong.

CDN's are definitely not a 'set up once and it's done'. My advice is work on the optimisation on your site and don't rely on any potential CDN benefits you think you may get.

[rubben1985]

Agree with some things said here, but not with all. If your market is local, definitely you do not need a CDN. Said that I started to use the CDN service in a moment that my parents web was using more traffic than we had paid so I had to increase my monthly fee or use a CDN to take traffic load from it. I preferred the last option so I could also try the cdn service. I did some test and in far countries (as US), load time decreased considerably: 2 ,5 seconds I think to remember (to be honest I did not expect so much). That was enough to stay in the service at least by now. CDN only have sens if you want an international approach. There is a free trial so it is so easy to test (in less than 15 min can be set up) that I would recommend anyone to give a try if their customers are abroad.

[MockoB]

@DavidP thank you for the detailed explanation! That's the answer I needed and I believe others also. @rubben1985 it makes sense for international traffic, and 2,5 sec decrease in loading times is very good achievement!

[michael]

You can use CDN to parallel connection, using subdomains, but you need a separate SSL, or buy a wildcard ssl. There are many solution which works with SSL e.g cloudfront from Amazon AWS. Which have a free tier for 12 months. If you know how you can use it with SSL with no problems.

Like @lesley told sometimes you need to optimize a shop to see results.