HAIF on CDN

[editor]

I was originally going to keep this private until the deal was done, but I thought I'd post it here since there are a lot of geeks in the audience who might find it interesting.

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I'm very close to working out a deal where HAIF (and just HAIF, not the rest of the web sites or even the Houston Architecture.com building site) would be distributed in a CDN (content distribution network).

For those of you not familiar with CDNs, they're a way to speed up the delivery of web sites by moving them geographically closer to the user.

HAIF would be mirrored on a bunch of server farms around the world. If someone accesses HAIF from Chicago, the page would be served off a machine in Chicago. If someone accesses HAIF from London, the page would come out of London or Maidenhead. If someone accesses HAIF from Seattle, it would come out of Seattle or Portland.

Of course, very few of our visitors come from any of those cities. Traffic is still 97% Houston. But I'm not sure where the pages would be served from yet because things aren't quite in stone yet.

Right now, all of HAIF comes out of Pittsburgh, so getting it on a CDN with nodes in Texas is my #1 goal.

Best case scenario: Everyone south of Huntsville and north of El Campo gets pages served from Houston. Everyone south and west of Sealy gets HAIF from San Antonio. Everyone north of Huntsville gets it from Dallas.

More likely scenario: Everyone gets their HAIF from Dallas. Which isn't ideal, but it's a thousand miles closer to Houston, and should hopefully cut the page delivery time in half. Page rendering time will also be significantly reduced because HAIF would come off of the CDN's state-of-the-art server farm, and not from my state-of-the-ark single server that's also pushing 15 other web sites.

CDNs aren't cheap, but I think HAIF's footprint might be light enough not to break the bank. Hopefully I can come to an agreement on price that works out for all involved. These improvements are funded by the good people who understand that ads on HAIF are part of the tradeoff, and not those sort of people who block ads because they feel they should get something for nothing.

I'll keep you updated if any progress is made.

[boounce]

Your site is not slow to me. I would carefully consider the added complexity and additional costs of a CDN. CDNs are best for sites that serve a lot of static content like images and video.

Give the people what they want.

[editor]

Your site is not slow to me. I would carefully consider the added complexity and additional costs of a CDN. CDNs are best for sites that serve a lot of static content like images and video.

Give the people what they want.

Thanks. I'm glad to hear that it's good for you. But it's not consistently good for everyone.

For example, just today it was unreachable for 70% of the people for about 20 minutes because of a spike in traffic. A CDN would help deal with those problems, if not eliminate them entirely.

[brijonmang]

I don't experience any issues outside of a slow load time here and there. Nothing for me to complain about so I am indifferent at this point if you're trying to judge public opinion...