Home > Knowledge base > Using a CDN to host your media files

Using a CDN to host your media files

Posted by David W on Thursday, January 13, 2011 · Leave a Comment

People in the western society as of 2011, are somewhat impatient. If a document on the web loads takes more than 5 seconds to load, people get annoyed and is a lot more likely to go somewhere else. Really not fair if you ask me, but I do the same thing myself. This is something web site owners need to adapt to. Depending on the nature of the content your are offering your visitors, and also how popular a web site is, it might be a good idea to upgrade your WordPress hosting from being just a web hotel, to a better performing hosting solution. More recently, over the last year or two or so, using a Content Delivery Network has become a popular solution to be able to serve the needs of speeds.

Luckily for WordPress bloggers there are a couple of plugins that let you set up such a solution, allowing you to serve your CSS, JavaScripts, pictures etc, from CDN:s like Amazon or Google.

W3 Total Cache is a great plugin that helps you improve your site´s preformance and also set up a way of serving only some of your files through these types of network.

Mirror
Mirror: NetDNA / MaxCDN
Rackspace Cloud Files
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Self-hosted / File Transfer Protocol Upload

Of all the options of improving speed on your WordPress hosting, using a CDN is most likely the most effective way. Good luck! This impatience with “non-speedy” technology reminds me of this video;