Accelerating websites for overseas (Africa) with CDN

This is Haraoka from Beyond.
Today, I'll be talking about speeding up overseas websites using a CDN.

The customer's inquiry concerned a website hosted on a domestic server that was extremely slow to access in a certain African country.
Indeed, the distance from Japan to Africa is considerable, which naturally leads to delays in response times.

(The following is a quote)
Regarding the relationship between communication speed and communication distance
, in the TCP/IP communication method used on the internet,
the next data is sent only after confirming that the recipient has correctly received the data that was sent.
Therefore, when the communication distance is long, the time it takes to confirm the reply is longer than when the distance is short, and
it takes longer to send the next data.
Consequently, the farther the communication distance, the longer it takes to send all the data, and the lower the communication speed.
http://www.bbiq.jp/members/improvement/speed/distance/

by using a CDN so that content can be accessed from as close a location as possible
we adopted a technique to improve website response times

(The following is a quote)
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is
a system that
, through servers (CDN distribution platform) spread around the world
efficiently delivers content from the server closest to the end user who is trying to access it
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 quite useful as a debugging tool for websites, but
it also allows you to check the loading speed from numerous locations around the world.

Since this access is from Africa,
Rose Hill, Mauritius (Chrome)
selecting

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

As expected, access from Africa is extremely slow on domestic servers.
Therefore, we will use a CDN.

Check out CDNs available in Africa

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

While it's primarily focused on overseas services, it's quite useful because 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.
However, since it has a minimum cost of $1000,
Cloudflare also seems like a good option.

Just when I thought that was it, I came across an incredible company.
That's right, Akamai, a global company.
Details about Akamai are not revealed on this site,

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

Judging from the link below, it seems they have more than 30 locations.
http://wwwnui.akamai.com/gnet/globe/index.html
It's on a completely different level.

Akamai had a successful case study in Africa, demonstrating improved response times, which made it easier to convince our customers and facilitated a smooth implementation.
https://www.akamai.com/jp/ja/our-customers/customer-stories-carview.jsp

Changing the DNS server

After implementation, response times improved dramatically, but there was still an issue with slow DNS lookups. So,
we moved the domains that were configured on our domestic DNS servers to Amazon Route53, 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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