I wanted to give a quick review of MaxCDN, and talk a bit about why I like it so much. So, first of all, what is it? Well, MaxCDN is a Content Delivery Network, and in fact, it’s one of the largest Content Delivery Networks (CDN’s) in the entire world. So, what is a CDN, and why would you want one? Well, they serve a few purposes, but primarily they’re used for speeding up your website, and offering a higher degree of security which you wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere.
What it does is cache your static content across several servers all around the world, so that when someone wants to load your content, it gets loaded from the server which is closest to them, as opposed to getting loaded from your own server. So, if you’re in London, and your visitor is in Los Angeles, rather than the data having to cross all the way from London to Los Angeles, it instead can be taken from a local server right in L.A, which drastically increases the load time for that user. This speed increase not only improves the user experience, but also improves where your site shows up in search engines like Google (they’ll penalize you severely if your site loads slowly). On top of that, spreading the load over several servers all over the world will make it far less likely your server will crash due to stress from traffic.
MaxCDN
So, now that I’ve talked about CDN’s, let’s look at MaxCDN specifically. There are very few CDN’s which can rival MaxCDN in size and user-base alone… it’s by far one of the largest CDN’s on the market, as well as being one of the most reliable ones as well. It’s earned its place as being one of the “top dogs” when it comes to CDN solutions, by constantly providing quality service to its customers. Ever since I started using it, I’ve noticed my site load speeds have increased tremendously, my search engine rankings have improved greatly as well (as is to be expected), making the service well worth every single penny.
Being a WordPress user, I needed a solution which would integrate quite easily with WordPress, and was disappointed when other services failed to do so. Luckily, MaxCDN makes it a breeze, and it works hand in hand with W3 Total Cache to boost load speeds even further. It doesn’t matter where someone is in the world, MaxCDN will load all of my cached pages (which is just about all of them) extremely quickly the moment they reach the page. This is super helpful, particularly for people who live in areas of the globe which are relatively far away from my host.
Another nice feature is the ability to handle much more traffic, because the server stress is split-up over several servers around the world, so my sites aren’t likely to crash due to having too much traffic at any one time. Normally, when this occurs, you have to go to your host and order a much more expensive hosting package, but MaxCDN has me covered, and for a much lower price. I honestly don’t see any reason I’d use another service instead of MaxCDN, and I’ve tried a few. So, to sum up… I highly recommend you start using a CDN yourself if you’re not using one at the moment, and, if you’re using something other than MaxCDN, then I highly recommend that you make the switch right away. It quickly pays for itself in free traffic with just the added SEO traffic you get alone.
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