How do you know when a CDN setup is right for your XenForo installation?

John L.

John L.

Well-known member
Might seem like a silly question, but I'm curious to know what other people have seen with their forums in terms of speed and reliability. How did you determine it was time to use a CDN setup? Are you still debating it like myself? I only have 450+ members on my forums. My site still runs relatively fast, but I always wonder if it could be a bit faster. Did you do some testing? Perhaps some comparisons? Any links to tools that could help?

I would love the feedback and experiences you guys have about this.
 
I use a CDN on all of my forums. MaxCDN to be exact. I just see it as a simple and cheap way to increase the load times of your forum, large or small. A few of my forums have a bit of international traffic as well, so helping those load times is great.
 
BamaStangGuy said:
I use a CDN on all of my forums. MaxCDN to be exact. I just see it as a simple and cheap way to increase the load times of your forum, large or small. A few of my forums have a bit of international traffic as well, so helping those load times is great.
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Why would you want to increase the load time of your forums?
 
Thanks guys, loaded it on my forums and it's soo much faster for my international users. I've also noticed a small bump as well. It's great. For those wondering I'm using MaxCDN and used Adam's tutorial to configure it all.
 
It makes me laugh about the better SEO that MaxCDN advertise as a positive of using their services. Ummm... their services have nothing to do with a fast loading page for Google, or other search provider, as search providers scrape your site based on your servers location, thus they do so from a server close to it, not across the globe. To a search engine, your page only loads as fast or slow as your hosting allows + your actual page size itself determines.

Honestly... unless you're delivering large files to users globally, then a CDN is hyped nonsense to run your average website from. There is no requirement to use it for an every day forum or such. Once images, css and such are loaded once, regardless of location, they're cached on the persons computer for each load thereafter.

Forum users will also get two different speeds. One for guests, one for members. Members load more queries than guests depending on what is shown to both respectively. Test your site speed as a guest, not logged in.
 
It does not matter so much the number of members, but the amount of traffic and bandwidth in GB.

Perhaps the question should be at what sort of traffic level is a CDN advisable?
 
Anthony Parsons said:
It makes me laugh about the better SEO that MaxCDN advertise as a positive of using their services. Ummm... their services have nothing to do with a fast loading page for Google, or other search provider, as search providers scrape your site based on your servers location, thus they do so from a server close to it, not across the globe. To a search engine, your page only loads as fast or slow as your hosting allows + your actual page size itself determines.

Honestly... unless you're delivering large files to users globally, then a CDN is hyped nonsense to run your average website from. There is no requirement to use it for an every day forum or such. Once images, css and such are loaded once, regardless of location, they're cached on the persons computer for each load thereafter.

Forum users will also get two different speeds. One for guests, one for members. Members load more queries than guests depending on what is shown to both respectively. Test your site speed as a guest, not logged in.
Click to expand...
There are more advantages to a CDN than edge locations, this being one of the biggest.

http://gtmetrix.com/parallelize-downloads-across-hostnames.html
 
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