Tech

5 Ways To Speed Up Your Cloud Hosted Website

With the growing importance of fast websites, everyone is trying to get their websites running at blazing speed. At this juncture, if your website is hosted on the Cloud then you should be happy. That’s because in this post, we are going to discuss how to speed up your cloud hosted website with the help of Cloud Hosting Provider s.

Unlike Shared, Dedicated or VPS Hosting, Cloud Hosting is a different ball game altogether. It works based on a network of servers. The network has multiple machines, and they are often pulled from various data centres in different locations, giving you ample opportunities to optimize overall performance.

Let’s look at some of the ways that can make a huge difference in page load times.

Installing Specialized Cache: The way cache works is simple! All it does is stores the view of the webpage that is being accessed in its memory, so that it can be quickly shared with future visitors without having to go through the whole server request-response ordeal. Caching can increase your Page Speed by up to 6 times! It’s also pretty simple to implement and many of the better Cloud Hosting Providers are integrating cache within their Cloud Hosting plans. For instance ResellerClub integrates Varnish Caching in their Cloud Hosting Plans, which is like the best kind of Caching available. So talk to your Hosting Provider and have caching installed at the earliest!
Make the Best of CDN (Content Delivery Network): A CDN is a network of servers which are spread across a wide geographical area. The way they help is that, whenever a user is trying to access the hosted website data, the Content Delivery Network analyses the location of the user and configures the server geographically closest to the user to serve the requested data. This hugely reduces the latency of data transfer over the network. Cloud Hosting Providers have lately started incorporating CDNs in their overall Cloud Hosting architecture. Having an exhaustive discussion with them to apply it for your site can largely help optimize your site’s speed.
Check if the Website and Database Reside on the same Data Centre: As CDNs help improve latency with respect to User-Server proximity, same is the deal with your hosted website resources and your database. If the proximity between them is higher, the data transmission between the two is faster. Most Hosting providers disclose where all the elements reside on the cloud. You can make a request to have all your resources in close proximity.
Upgrading Physical Hardware of the Cloud Network: Cloud Hosting will only perform as good as the underlying hardware. Periodically check the configuration and specifications of the Cloud hardware such as CPUs, type of RAM, storage and memory etc. and if you find that any of the hardware peripherals are outdated or outclassed, notify your Cloud Hosting Provider and put in a request for an upgrade. Yes, Cloud Hosting Providers are responsible for delivering the best possible hardware resources for your Cloud Hosting, but it would not hurt to check every now and then. And with the speed of IT hardware innovation these days, you are bound to find areas of improvement within your Cloud’s hardware configuration.
De-duplication: Yes, it is known that data duplication and mirroring is essential as a failsafe; but, it also hogs on the network bandwidth whenever traffic associated with data backups is being transmitted. But data duplication cannot be avoided. So the workaround is to mirror data smartly. De-duplication removes network traffic associated with data backups by performing a single complete backup of a given file(s), and then only send changed portions of those files over time, rather than the entire file. Speak to your Cloud Hosting Provider to see if such techniques are in place, which can really help your overall website speed over the Cloud.

That beings said, it is always a good idea to analyse Cloud Hosting Providers thoroughly and select the ones who are implementing such tactics or even support you to set it up for your website over the Cloud. This, coupled with website development best practices like compression, minifying files and scripts etc. can really push the needle further when it comes to page speed. Hope this helps and we would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments section below!