I think about hosting stuff public and am using dropbox for now. This is pretty awesome but sometimes a bit slow and I have this certain kind of feel of non-professional touch doing so. Mostly the url makes me thinking so:
There are a lot of ways to approach this but one way, which is simple, user-friendly and free, is to add Cloudflare to your existing site. It’s a sort of Swiss Army knife CDN.
I assume you want a CDN primarily to serve your files (videos?) more quickly. Yes? However, if you mainly want a file storage service and aren’t concerned about server latency etc. then Cloudflare isn’t what you want.
I set up a CDN a couple of years ago, and it is not for the faint of heart. I allow users to post things on it (sign up for an account and send me an e-mail off-list so I can “promote” you to an author) but I pay for the bandwidth out of my own pocket, and most of the content there is really tiny stuff – JS and CSS files and sprite images. I’d probably get a bit cheesed off if you started hosting your screencasts there.
If you have a few large files that you want to deliver via CDN, and you don’t mind managing those files manually, then what you do is set up an account on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and upload the files to S3. Once they are in S3, you can enable CloudFront CDN for each individual file. (Don’t forget to set the file as world-readable first!) Once you do that, you will have a new URL for that file which routes into the CloudFront network, and whenever that file is requested, the nearest end-point that has a copy will deliver the file. The major down-side to this system is that if you update the file, the changes will not percolate out to the other “edge” servers for a very long time (years, I think). The only ways to truly update something are to either rename it (and thus change all the URLs) or use the AWS control panel to remove the cached version from the CDN. This takes a fair amount of time, and is kind of fiddly.
The CDN system I set up is backed by S3/CloudFront, but I wrote a Rails application to manage the files, and forced new file paths whenever a file changed (incrementing version numbers). This was a minor pain in the ass to build, but it keeps me from having to do a lot of hand-work when I want to change something. The management application is free open-source, available from my GitHub account: GitHub - walterdavis/cdn_control: Manage an S3/Cloudfront CDN from this Rails application.
Walter
On Jan 16, 2015, at 5:33 PM, Todd email@hidden wrote:
Perhaps I misunderstood what you need.
I assume you want a CDN primarily to serve your files (videos?) more quickly. Yes? However, if you mainly want a file storage service and aren’t concerned about server latency etc. then Cloudflare isn’t what you want.
All of FreewayCast and all of my Actions that hit the CDN and all of my Glacier off-site backup for my entire local network comes to ~$15 a month, and that is no big deal. If you were just hosting little assets, then this should be perfect for you. Sign up, let me know off-list, and try it out. If it works for you, then great. If it is too much hassle, then no harm. I doubt sincerely that it will be anything but a rounding error on my regular bill.
Walter
On Jan 17, 2015, at 1:36 PM, Thomas Kimmich email@hidden wrote:
… and thanks Walter for your nice offer, but it’s probably more personal than FW general for to take advantage of.
This site was unreachable yesterday for around 4 hours and maybe longer. I don’t know how effective CloudFlare is for sites with fast changing content because everything is cached but I quite often find the Freeway forums are either difficult to reach or slow loading.
I have just signed up with CloudFlare Pro for a site I am building, having first tried Incapsula. It’s a learning process and I won’t claim to fully understand the way it is all working but pinging my website now results in an IP number based in Los Angeles, even though my server is in London.
I just wondered if those among you using a CDN are also leveraging the browser cache in the .htaccess file to create header expiry dates? I was doing this but it looks like CloudFlare has an option in their control panel and you can set the time for items to remain in the browser cache. I imagine that doing this via .htaccess as well might cause a conflict but a certain percentage of visitors will presumably receive files direct from my server rather than the CDN and I want those to be fast as well.
Does anybody know if it makes sense to enable Gzip in the .htaccess file. There is an option to do this in cPanel and presumably CloudFlare does this as well. I am expecting a big spike in traffic in a few weeks, so I want to have everything primed for speed and stability.