At the agency I work for, we recently put all ~1,100 of our sites behind a CDN. It seems to be working. Unfortunately, I have no idea why or how we did this. Therefore, in the first part of this article, I force our CTO, Joshua Lynch, to explain the process to me. This has the unintended consequence of Josh suggesting I try this on my own website, a process I’ll narrate for the second half of the article.
I learned three surprising things:
- In our case, the biggest benefit to being behind a CDN is actually not performance or security, but rather the “DNS abstraction layer”, a concept I’ll explain below.
- Moving to a CDN was a difficult process for us, but only because we have a high domain-to-staff ratio. For a single site, it would be a breeze.
- There are no worries about media files 404’ing; no urls need to change. In other words, the common concern about missing post-content images and such is not an issue for us.
Surprised? I was. Without further ado, Josh explains it all.
The Interview
What was the
