Apr 27, 2011
When it comes to servers, landing pages, and content, optimizing is everything. Finding the best places to host your servers, finding the best places for your content, and finding the best plugins and modules on your servers for delivery. Just recently as I’ve been in vegas since adtech I’ve had some time to sit down and talk to my aff friends about this into some detail. We’ve gone over the datacenter discussion with some talking about liquidweb, others rackspace, some even hostgator and the planet. Whatever your preference is the one thing is common has been performance and optimization.
Server wise its good to have a host that have alot of upstream providers, you want to host with someone who is well connected and uses tier 1 bandwidth providers. A lot of the good ones mentioned above are on backbones and can give greater availability and smaller access time for the content you are serving. If you are running a huge buy or advertising on ppv traffic and your host goes down you only really have yourself to blame. I’ve heard countless stories where affs get shitty hosting or don’t really allow themselves to understand the difference between a vps and an actual server and the big differences they have.
Content delivery is another thing to consider. With CDN companies popping up all over its worth it to take a look around instead of just staying with a big guy like Amazon s3. There are so many networks out there which can do it better, just because its amazon doens’t always mean they know fully what they are doing. I’ve tested a coupel and found that s3 isn’t the best, its good but who wants to be good when you can be great. Look around there are better cdn’s out there.
What http client are you using on your server? What modules have you installed? You’ll hear people talk about nginx, lightspeed, lighttpd, apache, and a couple more but which is better, what if you don’t install the correct caching module? The problem is all of these can be a great strength or it can be a great fault depending on how you configure them.
I just recently went through all this and using a load testing service found that it was taking 2.5 seconds for my landing pages to load, 2.5 seconds on a fast connection, imagine how long it would take someone on cable, dsl, or “gasp” a modem. I was able to shave over 2 seconds off my load time and allow my landing pages to load in 300ms.
This begs the question, how much did those 2 seconds affect roi? If I told you, you’d be pleasantly surprised. Lets just say i would optimize if I were you, the revenue you are losing is more than you might think.
CHEAA!
So true
this post is relevant to my interests
Defo agree with you
You might wanna double check those numbers, 300ms is virtually impossible. You’re looking at anywhere from 50-80ms for the initial DNS lookup, another 50ms to establish the TCP connection (more with SSL used). Even in the absolute best case scenario it’ll still be 200-300ms at a minimum before the client will even be receiving content at all. And even then, you couldn’t include/link any external assets whatsoever (no CSS, no JS, no images).
So yeah, I seriously doubt those numbers.
I’m on a VPS and recently started using CDN but really am not sure how all these have affected my results.
At the same time, I’d like to know how to improve my loading speeds etc further.
Can you point us to any tutorials with regards to these or are you planning to post more about this soon?
this is something i’ve known for a while but being a newer aff, i just got setup with storm and thought that’d take a big chunk out of the problems…could you go more in depth by chance of common issues that should be addressed?
Thanks!
A good rule of thumb when choosing you’re webhost is to choose a location that has a good route to the majority of your traffic source. So if your PPV campaign is targeting US, get a server either in central US or on the coast that you get the majority of your traffic from… If your targeting Asian users, get a server on the west coast of the US (will save you a lot of money to host in the US).
As for a CDN. Different CDN’s provide better/worse latency for certain locations… Again it would be best to test the latency from where the majority of your traffic is coming from. (MaxCDN may have better routes to Europe then Amazon, but Amazon may be better to Asia, so it’s always best to test).
When choosing a CDN, make sure they use Anycast as it will speed up delivery of content.
If your using javascript libraries (jquery), then make sure to include them from an external CDN (use google or microsoft).
If your page has javascript, put it in an external file and put it on your CDN (will cut down more time).
Any static content (images, css, videos) should also be added to your CDN.
Your DNS can also be a big hold up. If you want the quickest, then make sure your DNS host uses Anycast. (Most webhosts don’t provide Anycast, so it may be best to go with an external DNS host).
As for the http client, I use cherokee (quick and provides a nice gui). But unless you are hitting large connections at once, then you shouldn’t need to go any further than your average optimization.
If your really paranoid about load time, then you can also remove whitespace from your javascript and html… But that’s being a bit anal.
Sorry for things being thrown around in any order, just typed it as it came to me.
@Morgan: Just because you got 2.5 seconds quicker on the test, doesn’t mean thats the same for all locations… On the other side of the country, it could load slower. (Not likely, but always a slim possibility).
If you guys want to know more details, just post again and I’ll check back later.