Hosting, routing and performance conundrum

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Posted by missym on July 4, 2008 at 5:56pm

I have a site that will be heavily used in only six or eight states but they are on different sides of the continental US. I found a really fast host on the east coast with super service, etc, but whenever there is heavy network traffic, it is dog slow on the west coast. I imagine the opposite is true. I found this by doing a tracert and seeing that the big delay was in the middle of the country.

Does anyone have any thoughts or advice on how to select a host for best performance in this case? It is truly a conundrum.

Comments

If you have alot of static

Posted by tjholowaychuk on July 4, 2008 at 6:45pm

If you have alot of static content such as images, JavaScript, CSS etc you could invest in one of a variety of Content Delivery Network providers such as simplecdn or cachefly which will distribute these files according to the users geolocation

Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design

Although that is a great

Posted by missym on July 4, 2008 at 6:58pm

Although that is a great solution, what would a backup plan to that be? Do you just pick a server in Denver or Houston until the client gets on the program to pay for the CDN? I welcome your thoughts and ideas. Cachefly seems pretty reasonable.

start with normal tuning, then CDN, then...

Posted by greggles on July 5, 2008 at 4:49pm

I'd say start with really basic tuning of the site using YSlow which, if you follow all their advice then the problems from routing will be reduced quite a bit.

Then I'd suggest going for a cdn like cachefly. Frankly, their prices are pretty reasonable. If you show your client "well, I could spend 8 more hours working on this problem with no good solution or you could take that same money and spend it on cachefly" that should be a compelling argument. Something like cachefly is certainly cheaper and better for all users than trying to move hosts...

Once you've exhausted those...well...then it's time to look into something more complex.

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Good ideas, Greggles.

Posted by missym on July 7, 2008 at 4:44am

Good ideas, Greggles. Thanks. I'd like to plug Ace Net Inc. They are incredibly responsive and have really techs that know what they are talking about.

High performance

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