Last night I made the decision to make use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to alleviate stress on my site’s server. My server is based in Silicon Valley, San Jose, California, therefore all requests made to my domain name would resolve in an IP address that took visitors directly to there, and the server would generate the requested page and send it to the visitor. I’ve changed the name-servers on my domain name so that all visitors are instead routed to CloudFlare. They keep cached copies of my files in up to 180 data-centres spread all over the world. When someone visits my site, CloudFlare will first look to see where that visitor is located, and then direct them to a data-centre that keeps the distance data has to travel to a minimum.
I was a little wary of implementing this but only 12 hours after setting it all up, everything seems to be running smoothly, and very quickly.