Joomla CDN: Who Needs One?

A Joomla plugin that speeds up a site's loading time. Sounds perfect, right? In its simplest terms, that is exactly what a CDN Joomla does. But plenty of site developers have expressed reservation over whether CDN is really needed for smaller or less traffic-heavy websites. This begs the question: Who actually needs a Joomla CDN?

A brief background: Joomla is an open source content management system that helps site developers build their websites easily with various content templates. Tracking a site's content is also made easier with Joomla, and with plenty of extensions that allow the integration of various content types, developers can have a field day in building different applications and uploading all sorts of content as they see fit.

This is where things can get sticky. For a website hosted in a single origin server, or shared with other sites as hosted by a commercial web hosting service, all of that content can mean slow load times. Surges in traffic can also add to the decrease in a site's speed, if not an outright site crash. This is where a Joomla CDN comes in. A CDN or content delivery network, is a software and a series of servers that grabs and hosts a site's static content such as CSS, javascript and images and farms them to different servers around the world. In effect, they ease the pressure on origin servers to deliver all of a site's content, and uses a CDN network server nearest to a site visitor to load up the stored static images. The result? Joomla sites with CDN load faster and can more effectively handle gradual to sudden surges in site traffic.

With these obvious benefits, why are some developers still on the fence about using CDN? A big concern seems to be costs. Most releases so far have been on the high-end of the spectrum, costing thousands of dollars. This price peg seems to limit CDN's use to large sites with millions of visitors from around the world.

MaxCDN.com's CDN plugin is a new release. One that seems to address lingering concerns about CDN's applicability and cost. Even as it delivers all the promises of a good CDN, namely faster load times and decreased latency times, buffer against crashes due to sudden traffic, and an overall improvement on visitor satisfaction, the costing model proves to be highly manageable. Charges for one terabyte of bandwidth can be as low as $19, while storage runs on a flat rate of $0.75 per one gigabyte. The pricing model is uniquely flexible, too, with costs growing or deflating depending on a site's own growth needs.

With this pricing model, there's little reason for a site developer to withhold from the many benefits of a CDN. Faster load times means higher site traffic, higher conversion rates and sales and better word of mouth. MaxCDN also addresses implementation concerns, with a highly simple copy pasting process and implementation that lasts for as short as a few hours. Technical support is also free and available 24/7 using various means such as phone, IM and email