Frequently Asked Questions
- What is a "Content Delivery Network (CDN)"
- What is "push" and "pull"
- How can I upload files to Tronkle CDN
- What is a "Content Delivery Network (CDN)"
A CDN is basically a bunch of servers in different geographical locations that serve parts of the website to users. Each time a user visits the website parts of the website will be served from a location that is closest to the user. The advantages are: minimized latency, maximized throughput (bandwidth), failure protection (by means of redundancy), load balancing. All these translate into speed and a better overall experience for your website visitors. If you want to learn more about content delivery networks and how they might help you please see the Wikipedia page.
- What is "push" and "pull"
When reffering to a CDN "push" means that when you upload content to the CDN this content is automatically copied (pushed) to all the servers in the CDN. When you use "pull" the content is retrieved from the original upload server upon request: when a user visits the website the edge server that is allocated to the user will either retrieve it from its' own cache or it will have to fetch it from another server.
When you use "push" each file will reside on every single server and possibly waste space if it's not frequently accessed in that geographical area. That's why CDN storage is so expensive compared to other services' storage. On the other hand if you use "pull" the first access of the file will be slow because it will have to be fetched from a remote location. That first "unlucky" user might have a slower website experience. But once the file is fetched it's also cached and other users will fully benefit from using a CDN. This approach is cheaper because it doesn't waste storage since files are cached according to demand.
Tronkle gives you the flexibility to choose between "push" and "pull" for each file. Other CDNs either offer only one of the options and forget to tell you about it in the first place.
- How can I upload files to Tronkle CDN
Currently we only offer sftp for uploading and managing files. This has a number of advantges: security (connections are completely encrypted), well supported on all operating systems, lots of clients to choose from and possibility to use with rsync.