PaceCDN - Connecting Content and Customers

DNS Less Mode

Resolving domain names may take time. Usually CDNs use domain names to deliver static content from their servers. This additional domain name resolution may introduce a delay (and it does) in many cases. We have introduced a new mode. We call it DNS Less Mode. In this mode we deliver your static content from our appropriate CDN host by using its IP address directly. That allows the fastest loading of your static content from our CDN.

Some details:

Suppose your site is your-good-site.com. Without CDN, your page's HTML and all linked content like js, css, images etc. is loaded from your-good-site.com. When a browser loads your-good-site.com, it first find the IP address of your server where your-good-site.com is hosted. This is called domain name resolution. You see? Here it happens just once. After that the browser gets your HTML from that server and start rendering it. The browser then get all linked files also from the same server.

What happens when you use a CDN? In that case the steps upto loading HTML are same as above but it gets different for linked files like js, css, images etc. In traditional CDNs, browser finds one or more different domain names for those linked files. That cause atleast one additional DNS lookup to resolve those CDN host names. What we do? We deliver your static files directly from IP addresses. No DNS lookup at all.

How do we find the best IP address for a given Visitor? Our plugin does this job by inspecting customers IP address on server and based on the IP location, set the IP address of nearest host in page's HTML. All this happens server side and very fast. This eliminates the time required for additional DNS lookups required in traditional CDNs.

 

 

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