You may have noticed Amazon urls scattered throughout Carleton’s web page source code recently. This is because we have started leveraging Amazon’s “Cloud” to help make our websites faster.
Amazon has been emerging as a proven Cloud computing environment providing low cost services in this area. ITS successfully piloted using Amazon’s cloud before moving into production with the launch of the new homepage.
How does hosting in Amazon’s cloud make our websites faster?
Normally we host all components of a web page (images, JavaScript files, styles sheets etc.) on one server. This often causes bottlenecks on the server, causing slow loading times. What we are able to do with the Content Delivery Network (CDN) hosted in Amazon’s cloud computing system is break up the load so that all components can load simultaneously.
A CDN distributes copies of files to various servers around the globe, allowing users visiting a website to download content from a server geographically closer to them. Website visitors then access a copy of the data in their geographic area, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server.
This is the first step in our strategic plan to further increase our Web server speed and response time.
For more information on CDNs please visit: