Accelerating websites for overseas (Africa) with CDN

This is Haraoka from Beyond.
This time, I'll be talking about speeding up websites for overseas users using CDNs.

One of the customers we received a consultation about was that a website hosted on a domestic server was extremely slow when viewed from a certain country in Africa.
Indeed, the distance from Japan to Africa is very long, so the response time is delayed accordingly.

(Quoted below)
Regarding the relationship between communication speed and communication distance
, the TCP/IP communication method used on the Internet
requires a reply from the other party to confirm that the data sent has been received correctly before sending the next piece of data.
For this reason, if the communication distance is long, it takes longer to confirm a reply than if the communication distance is short, and
it takes longer to send the next piece of data.
Therefore, the longer the communication distance, the longer it takes to send all the data, and the slower the communication speed.
http://www.bbiq.jp/members/improvement/speed/distance/

we adopted a method to improve the response time of the website by using a CDN so that content can be accessed from as close a location as possible

(Quoted below)
What is a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?
CDN is an abbreviation for Content Delivery Network, and

is a system that efficiently delivers content from the server closest to the end user attempting to access it
through a network of servers (CDN distribution platform) spread across the world http://www.cdnetworks.co.jp/about/

 

Check your access speed from overseas

To check the speed of your access from overseas, use the following website:

■WEBPAGETEST
http://www.webpagetest.org/

site is extremely useful as a website debugging tool, but
it can also check your page speeds from a number of international locations.

Since we are accessing from Africa this time,
Rose Hill, Mauritius (Chrome)
and access the site, we will get the results shown below.

*Below are the access results for our website, beyondjapan.com

As expected, access from Africa to domestic servers is very slow,
so we use a CDN.

Check out CDNs available in Africa

There are many different CDN services, but
the following website can be helpful in finding a CDN based in Africa.

Although it mainly focuses on overseas CDNs, I think it is very useful as it allows you to compare CDNs in various ways.
■CDNPlanet
https://www.cdnplanet.com/

• QUANTIL 5 locations
  https://www.cdnplanet.com/cdns/quantil/
  Djibouti Djibouti
  Kenya Mombasa
  Madagascar Antananarivo
  Mauritius Port Louis
  South Africa Cape Town - Johannesburg
• Cloudflare 4 locations
  https://www.cdnplanet.com/cdns/cloudflare/
  South Africa Johannesburg
  Kenya Mombasa
  Angola Luanda
  Djibouti Djibouti
• CDNetworks 3 locations
  https://www.cdnplanet.com/cdns/cdnetworks/
  South Africa Cape Town - Johannesburg
  Egypt Cairo
  Tanzania Dar es Salaam
• Level 3 3 locations
  https://www.cdnplanet.com/cdns/level3/
  South Africa Cape Town - Johannesburg
  Kenya Mombasa
  Djibouti Djibouti
• CacheFly 2 locations
  https://www.cdnplanet.com/cdns/cachefly/
  South Africa Johannesburg
  Egypt Cairo
• Fastly 1 location
  https://www.cdnplanet.com/cdns/fastly/
  South Africa Johannesburg

QUANTIL has the most locations with 5.

Cloudflare seems like a good option since the minimum cost is $1,000

But then I found something incredible.
It's the world-famous Akamai.
Details about Akamai are not revealed on this website, but

■Akamai
https://www.cdnplanet.com/cdns/akamai/

Judging from the following, it looks like there are over 30 locations.
http://wwwnui.akamai.com/gnet/globe/index.html
It's a whole different story.

Akamai has had success with improving response times in Africa, as shown below, which made it easy for customers to understand and the implementation went smoothly.
https://www.akamai.com/jp/ja/our-customers/customer-stories-carview.jsp

Changing the DNS server

After the implementation, response times improved dramatically, but slow DNS lookups were still an issue, so
we moved the domains that had been set up on domestic DNS servers to Amazon Route 53, which further improved response times.

Amazon Route 53 forwards data from locations around the world to the location closest to the access point, so you can expect fast responses and it is also inexpensive, so we highly recommend it

https://aws.amazon.com/jp/route53/

 

These are examples of how to use CDN overseas

If you are having trouble with the response of your overseas website, please contact Beyond!

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