Free CDN To Cope With High Demand - CoralCDN - Articles

Just in case you were wondering, a CDN or content delivery network is a large network of servers that are deployed in multiple data centres across the world. The main goal of a CDN is to serve content to users with high availability and high performance.

Many high traffic websites may need a CDN all year round to help their web servers cope with high demand and to keep their site running at top speed. But what if your website doesn’t have much traffic, but expects a large surge of visitors around a certain time? Maybe you are just about to launch a new product that has had a lot of marketing exposure, or your website holds results for a popular event. Well, if you have a low spec server or are on a shared hosting package this could very well cause problems. Your server may not be able to cope with the high demand and/or your hosting company may temporarily suspend your site for using too many resources.

The Solution

Content delivery networks are generally quite expensive, and if you only need it for a short time then justifying the cost can be quite difficult. But luckily there is a free alternative: CoralCDN.

“CoralCDN is a free and open content distribution network based around peer-to-peer technologies, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand.”

How To Use CoralCDN

Using CoralCDN is extremely simple. It can be used for anything static such as; images, css and javascript. It can even be used for a whole website if it is static and does not use a database (for example a WordPress site would not work). All you need to do is append nyud.net to a url and it will return the file/site via the CDN.

So, if you wanted to launch a whole site through CoralCDN, the URL would be like the following…

Normal URL:

https://www.thewebtaylor.com/static/

CoralCDN URL:

http://help.cazue.com.nyud.net/static/

But if you did want to launch the whole site through CoralCDN, you would have to give people the CoralCDN URL and not your normal website address.

The most advisable thing to do would be to keep your website on your own server, and serve the static elements on your site via CoralCDN. So you would simply have to change the links to your static files to include nyud.net. So for example serving an image through CoralCDN would be like the following…

Normal Image URL:

https://www.thewebtaylor.com/wp-content/themes/TheWebTaylor/images/digital-agency-cazue.png

CoralCDN IMage URL:

https://www.thewebtaylor.com.nyud.net/wp-content/themes/TheWebTaylor/images/digital-agency-cazue.png

One thing to bear in mind is that this is not a good long term solution. Although the service does work and is free, there can sometimes be downtime and loading issues. This is pretty rare, but if you want a long-term, more reliable service it is advisable to go with a paid CDN.

Posted on 11th April 2013 by Stuart in Website Management