The bigger your e-commerce business, the bigger the area your website has to serve. As you get visitors from farther away, page speed decreases, negatively impacting customer satisfaction, search engine rankings, and your profits.
If only you could open regional branches, like traditional retail chains do!
Well, we have good news for you: with the help of a Content Delivery Network, you can!
A CDN has powerful web servers all around the world. When you host your website on a CDN, all your static files (images, stylesheets, scripts) are instantly copied to all of the servers.
When a visitor opens your website, she gets all your static files from one of the CDN servers—the one closest to her. Thus, any visitor always gets your images, stylesheets, and scripts at the fastest possible speed, regardless of her geographical location. Your server is freed from this task and can generate pages faster. Combined, these factors greatly improve your page speed.
Marco Bannink, a long-time Avactis customer, recently began using the CloudFlare CDN for his fashion store Sustilo, in an attempt to increase its speed.
Even though the site was running on two expensive dedicated servers (application + database), page speed was low since the servers were overwhelmed by requests from a growing audience, mostly for static files.
CloudFlare was the perfect choice for quick implementation as it requires no modification of the store—it fetches and caches websites “as is”.
After nearly a month of usage, we conducted an interview with Mr. Bannink.
Q: How did you find out about CloudFlare?
Bannink: “We heard about it from Avactis, and they got us interested right away.”
Q: What was your initial reaction?
Bannink: “Well, it sounded too good to be true, but we got a good feeling about it when we saw the great support they offer via Twitter and tickets. When we had questions they were answered right away. We decided that if this was for real we had to get an account.”
Q: How did you like CloudFlare’s website and setup wizard?
Bannink: “We loved it; it’s attractive, clean, and clear.”
Q: How did you feel when you saw the reports and graphs?
Bannink: “It was amazing to see how much we’ve saved with CloudFlare!”
Q: Did CloudFlare help you save?
Bannink: “It saves us money because we don’t need to purchase more bandwidth or a faster server.”
Q: What was the most unexpected thing for you about CloudFlare?
Bannink: “The most unexpected thing for me was the price. For just a few dollars you can make your website so much faster!”
Q: If someone asks you about CloudFlare, what will you say?
Bannink: “Well, I don’t tell anybody. 😉 I do not want my competitors to find out. Let them be slow. 😀 But if a friend asks I’ll recommend it for sure!”
Mr. Bannink’s excitement is easy to understand. Soon after switching nameservers to CloudFlare, Sustilo.com’s page load time dropped from 7 to about 2 seconds. Application server load decreased and they were able to move the database from the second server and cancel it. The cost of the CloudFlare Pro plan paid for itself in less than a month.
We are publishing the following graphs from CloudFlare dashboard with Mr. Bannink’s permission.
The Avactis team wishes the Sustilo team success in their business, and highly recommends the CloudFlare CDN to all customers who offer an extensive selection of product.
