This is the second part in a three-part series where we describe some of the techniques used in Innota to make it so fast. This time we concentrate on delivering the content and how we are able to serve thousands of visitors from all around the world.
Here are the three key things we're concentrating in these posts:
- Part I: Making the content as small as possible
- Part II: Delivering the content as fast as possible
- Part III: Caching the content
Delivering the Content as Fast as Possible
When someone types in an address like https://www.innota.co in their web browser, the browser looks for a server named www.innota.co and gets the website content from there. Traditionally, there's been a simple web server named www.innota.co in some data center somewhere in the world.
This simple approach works for low traffic sites, but it's problematic if there are a lot of users loading the site from all over the world.
The Problems of a Global Audience
The Internet is made up of cables, wifi's and mobile networks, and the longer the distance data has to travel the longer it takes. It's physics, there's nothing you can do about that.
If you're in the US and try to load a website hosted in Europe, there's always some lag due to the transatlantic data transfer.
Global Content Delivery in Innota
So how do we overcome this obstacle in Innota? We serve the content from a server that's geographically as close as possible to the user loading the site.
That sounds simple and, basically, it is. We have 150 edge locations where we serve the content to a global audience.
If you're loading a site from the UK, we deliver the content from Dublin, Ireland or London, England whichever is closer to you. Or if you're in the US we serve the content from one of the 15 edge locations we have scattered around the US.
Thanks to this global approach we can deliver content to an international audience extremely fast. Best thing is that Innota does this automatically for you and you don't have to worry or know anything about servers or content delivery networks.
Conclusions
Like we already said in part I of the series there's nothing ground breaking here. Content delivery networks have existed for years.
Again the real innovation in Innota is the simplicity and ease of use. You can concentrate on your content and we'll take care of the rest.
