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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Posts
    63

    Best way to serve images - CDN? Other?

    I'm reworking a small client's website which gets about 20k visits/month and 50k PVs/month

    Predominantly, there is a lot of images and that's where the bandwidth usage comes into play. The "large" size images are about 500kb each, while I generate smaller thumbnail versions, etc. for smaller filesize.

    Depending on my client's activity, it looks like my client goes through anywhere from ~100-400gb/month in bandwidth, depending on the number of photos uploaded and viewed.

    I'm looking at a new web host located in Canada which is favourable since this is a 100% Canadian company/Toronto audience. However, they seem to limit bandwidth to 500gb whereas the current US host offers 2TB. The website redesign I've done actually favours larger images across the board, so I only expect bandwidth usage to increase - although exact amount unknown of course.

    I'm concerned about hitting the 500gb limit - even though it'd probably only be 50% of the time if that.

    I originally thought about a CDN which even though the host would be Canadian, a CDN may still be better for serving the images. According to http://www.cdncalc.com/, it looks like I'd be paying +$20/month which I can't really do because of their budget.

    I thought CloudFront was actually faster, but unless I used their http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html incorrectly, it looks to work out to +$45/month which is even worse.

    Any ideas/suggestions for what I could do to both optimize bandwidth usage AND user experience for a fast-loading experience? Would the host considering giving me a bump in bandwidth cap considering I wouldn't regularly hit it?

    If there are 25+ images on a page, I imagine loading them all off the shared host's server itself probably wouldn't be the most effective even if the location is in Canada - especially for tablets/phones.


    I also thought about using an API for some service like dropbox or flickr to store the original images and server them from there, but I don't know how well it would actually work or if any of the services really appreciate the direct linking to images...
    Last edited by Kaitlyn2004; 05-20-2014 at 01:25 AM.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Feb 2014
    Posts
    168
    CDN Will be pricy. Your best bet would be to go with a US host up north. Washington or NY or maybe chicago. There will be a small latency bump but who cares? Wont be noticeable. In the US you should get cheapest bandwidth and hardware. Would make an excellent static/img server to offload the burden to. Use nginx. Always.

    Also now that I think about it, since majority of your traffic (100%?) is in CA, why on earth would you ever need a CDN? Those are more for a global scale.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Posts
    63
    Quote Originally Posted by bitmarket View Post
    Also now that I think about it, since majority of your traffic (100%?) is in CA, why on earth would you ever need a CDN? Those are more for a global scale.
    Mainly was just thinking to leverage the infrastructure to serve images quickly, as opposed to a cheap shared hosting server

  4. #4
    Is the website hosted on on a shared, vps or dedicated. I know you can request more bandwidth if needed from any host. I have done that before and 98% it worked. They would be very happy to do that

  5. #5
    If you're able to host the images on a separate sub-domain then you could use a free CloudFlare account to serve them. You'd have to point your DNS there but can have the main domains point directly towards the web server and then have the images sub-domain hitting the CloudFlare network. CloudFlare have servers in Toronto too.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Dec 2013
    Posts
    522
    Add to it is that you can't get 500Gb on a cdn for less then $40.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Oct 2013
    Posts
    32
    1.you can use subdomain to server images for eg subdomain1.yourdomain.com will be on separate vps and subdomain2.yourdomain.com and will be on another vps with cloud flare enabled
    2.you can use image compression tool such as "yahoo smush it" before uploading the images to the server ( this will reduce few kb )
    3.you go for cdn if you can afford it

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Kaitlyn2004 View Post
    I also thought about using an API for some service like dropbox or flickr to store the original images and server them from there, but I don't know how well it would actually work or if any of the services really appreciate the direct linking to images...
    To my surprise when I uploaded my standard 16MB test page with full-scale images (2048px) to DropBox's public folder I had significantly lower loading speed (measured by GTmetrix from Vancouver, CA) than with most shared hosts that I used so far.

    And the fastest average loading was from DigitalOcean in NY2, but this is unmanaged SSD VPS.
    Last edited by Samuray; 05-25-2014 at 07:57 AM. Reason: added: public folder
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