Best practice for hosting static content on high traffic websites?

feenster99 · 6 Jul 2009 at 12:01

Best practice for hosting static content/parallelized loading?

Hi all,
I have a e-commerce website that is getting more and more traffic (~1000 visits per day). I want to alter the structure around to serve static content (CSS, layout images etc) from a different domain to help with the site speed.

The site is running on a Linux server. I have full control over the server, the site and any DNS records.

My plan was to setup a new subdomain on the same server, http://static.domain.com, copy relevant files to it and update the stylesheets etc to use the new subdomain. However, i've seen a couple of sites mention setting up a CNAME DNS record pointing back to the same site and do it that way.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what is the best practice for setting this up? Paying for a CDN website isn't an option.

Cheers,
Matt

feenster99 · 6 Jul 2009 at 12:56

Sorry, looks like I didn't phrase it that well. What I meant was, to make the site load quicker for the end user, I could take advantage of parallelized loading. As I understand it, most modern browsers should load from at least 2 different DNS names at the same time.

Re-reading my post, it looks like I typed something completely different to what my brain was wanting to type.

To take advantage of the parallelized loading, will the seperate sub-domain work sufficiently, or is there a better way to do it?

feenster99 · 6 Jul 2009 at 19:15

Thanks guys - gzip and some caching already in place.

The problem i'm trying to solve is that the images for the layout load, followed by the images for the products. Because of the complexities of the design, and the number of product images on one page, I want to try and load them at the same time. Whilst this won't have any affect on server loads etc, it should help the user's perception of the speed of the website. It seems quite a common technique - both Google and Yahoo mention it as something you should do, but don't quite go into enough detail about it.

Matt

feenster99 · 15 Jul 2009 at 21:41

Thanks guys. I'm already doing all of the above, except the sprite image thing. I didn't realise you could use it that effectively. I'll look further into it.