Just a normal day when you notice that your website is not working. Images are not loading, videos are stuttering, etc.
Or you are close to your site storage limit. (me)
This is a common scenario for many people who are just starting out with their website. The solution to this problem is simple, you need a CDN (Content Delivery Network). A CDN is a network of servers distributed across the globe that serves content to users based on their location. A CDN helps in reducing latency and improving performance of your website by serving content from the server that is closest to your user. Or in my case, to store large files somewhere else.
Of course it depends what your use case is. I found the best solution for myself so it might not be the best for you. I have tested some CDNs and here are the best ones for your small personal site to use:
Cloudflare & Github
This one is pretty straight forward. You need to sign up for a free account. Github has pages that are hosted on their CDN, so in theory you could host your images there. You also get a nice url for it too. Cloudflare is something else, its much better as CDN. Has much more locations that it can serve from and more features. Although some of the features are paid. But you will need your own domain name to use it.
Cloudinary
This one is a bit more complicated. You need to sign up for a free account. You can use it for free with monthly credits. I mainly use it to serve images now but they are also able to serve videos. you get a couple of free credits per month (currently have 30). you get 1GB of storage usage per credit, this includes uploads and downloads. You can get more credits for simple share rewards. It has the possibility to do transformations on images and videos too! You can do about 1000 transformations per credit.
Cloudinary is a great CDN. All other real CDN's I checked out were paid or only accessible via an API. Did I forget to mention that it has the best Web UI? also, it is free.
Dropbox
You might be a bit confused about this one, but it will make sense after I tell you how it works. Dropbox is actually a cloud storage service just like Google Drive, Mediafire or Mega Upload. Only this one is different. Instead of only giving you a download link, you can also link the raw file to your website. This is a great way to store large files like videos or music that you can embed on your website. you only need to replace ?dl=0 with ?raw=1 in the link. Thats it.
I'm gonna wrap this up. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me. I'm always happy to help. I'm also always looking for new ways to improve my website, so if you have any ideas, feel free to contact me.
Tags: CDN
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