Improving performance of high traffic websites by hosting near your audience

One of the specialisms we've developed over the many years we've been hosting websites is in managing the hosting of high volume and high traffic websites. Our customers include companies from the media, online publishing, e-commerce and public sectors, which attract high volumes of traffic.

We have a range of tools and techniques that we use to reduce the strain on busy websites and improve performance. You can read about many of these by clicking here, but in this blog post we’re going to focus on one very easy measure that can be taken to achieve better performance…

Move content closer to your audience

As much as we all talk about the Cloud and wireless these days, the Internet still relies on data travelling through wires in order to function. The less data you need to move across the Internet through those wires, the better that will be for the performance of your website.

The closer your website is to the end user - the person visiting your website - the lower the quantity of data you need to move around the internet. That means your website will be faster for them to use.

And it is not just user experience that improves from having your content closer to the user. When people are using your website faster, that means less strain on your server and greater capacity to serve the website to more people.

How to get your data nearer to end users

High traffic websites can dramatically improve performance by splitting the website into multiple nodes and hosting iterations of their website in popular territories. For instance, an e-commerce site that was founded in the UK and geared up to serve the UK market, but suddenly finds itself very popular in Australia, could create a replicated website and host that in Australia.

The fastest growing websites can even benefit from doing something similar in markets that are relatively close geographically. For example, a high traffic website that draws its audience almost exclusively from the UK and Ireland could benefit from hosting a version of the website in both London and Dublin.

Even that helps to share the high demand and reduce the cumulative distance that your data is being forced to travel.