Dear WordPress Aficionado,
Are you a fan of Agent 007?
If so, you probably have noticed that he always has all he needs to accomplish his missions. Money, guns, passports, and classy cars, you name it. Also, agent Bond always finds a helping hand wherever he goes.
Why?
Because MI6 has a wide network of agents and associates that work for them and it’s their job to collect information, cooperate, and more.
So when there is an agent in need, they are always ready to help.
The whole spy system functions a lot like a…
Content Delivery Network (CDN):
Your website is the MI6 headquarter that holds all the resources needed for loading a web page. Then it can spread these resources all over the Internet with the help of a CDN.
The Wikipedia definition for it is the following:
“A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end-users. “
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
What it says is that if you are using such a network, there are many servers around the world that cache the content of your website. And when your users are geographically closer to one of these “proxy servers,” they get the cached content and get it way faster.
It sounds like a handy service, right?
Suppose you want to speed up your website for users far away from you. Users that live in countries on the other end of the world.
Then you have a choice:
First, you can configure your own “secondary servers,” put them behind a “load balancer,” and watch your maintenance and hosting expenses skyrocket.
You’ve just built your own subpar content delivery network…
Second, you can have one “origin server” and use a mainstream CDN. The cost for the latter will be very reasonable. It’s professionally maintained. And some of the services offer free plans, so you can start small and with no risk.
Third, you can have one “origin server,” several STRATEGICALLY located “secondary servers,” and use a mainstream content delivery network.
That setup is kind of middle ground…
If your WordPress site doesn’t get millions of hits a month, you probably will profit most from the second option. It’s a cost-effective way to make your web pages load faster, reduce bandwidth costs and introduce some security measures against DDoS attacks.
But we’re going to talk about all this next time…
Cheers,
Sashe Vuchkov
The Code & Marketing Combinator
