After Google added page loading speed as a factor determining search results, webmasters are in a quest to improve their site speed. Many of you may already experiment with page caching and image optimizing techniques. If you are done with those experiments and seriously looking for more ways for speed optimization then one thing you have to consider is the use of a Content Delivery Network or CDN. CDN is a distributed cluster for your content delivery. It is a system of computers containing copies of your data, placed at various geographical locations so as to maximize download speed and availability of the data.
Average bloggers usually don’t use CDN’s because the plans of popular CDN services are very expensive and not affordable for small blog’s. But recently a new company called SpeedyMirror comes up with affordable plans and the best part of it, you can get that for free. SpeedyMirror offers a free plan for data transfer up to 50 GB (enough to drive an average blog for 6 – 7 months). Even if you exceed the limit you can continue using them by paying just $0.034 for each GB (the cheapest on the planet, I think). I tried SpeedyMirror on my blog and the results were very impressive.
How to Setup SpeedyMirror?
First go to SpeedyMirror.com and create an account.
Once you confirmed the email address log in to your SpeedyMirror account and start setting up mirrors. You can have as many as mirrors you want so that you can use it for multiple blogs. Click on the Mirror link andAdd New Mirror Button.
Now give a name for your mirror, enter URL of your blog/website and hit Detect and Save button. Now your mirror is ready to use. Each mirror (alias) gets a free subdomain of the following format: youralias.speedymirror.com. If you need a better look for your mirror you can setup a subdomain for your mirror. My mirror name is rojish.speedymirror.com. I created a subdomain cdn.rojish.com and pointed it to my mirror.
If you want to do this login to your hosting control panel. Then create a new CNAME record for you CDN (eg: cdn.yourdomain.com). Then point your CNAME record to your mirror URL (eg: youralias.speedymirror.com)
So that is how to setup a mirror. Now we want to configure it for your blog.
How to configure SpeedyMirror for WordPress?
First you need to have W3 Total Cache plugin installed on your blog (I know most of you may already have that, it is the best caching plugin I ever used).
Now go to the General Settings of W3 Total Cache.
Scroll down to CDN Configuration and Enable CDN and Choose the CDN type as Mirror.
Now choose the Content Delivery Network Settings page.
Replace sites hostname with your mirror’s URL.
You can Test Mirror and Save Changes.
So that is it, you setup a CDN for your blog. Now use some speed measuring tools and feel the change.
