A website/application hosted in a datacenter is usually available for everyone around the world but the user experience may varies a lot depending on where the user is located.

The website was made of PHP and CSS (containing a form, a 15MB static video and two 700kB pictures) from an hypothetical record e-com. It was hosted in an Amazon datacenter under EC2 service in North Virginia, US. An online tool called Webpagetest was used to test a 3G connection from Sao Paulo (Brazil) to Virginia.
In order to overcome the latency drawback for distant locations, the solution could be using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) service. This way the content may be cached in a POP (Point Of Presence) closer to the user.
Amazon has a CDN service called Cloudfront that applies a virtual IP to do the “magic”.

In a later moment, Webpagetest compared EC2 vs CDN requests both from Sao Paulo. The page load time is faster on CDN´s once the distance is shorter now.

At last the page load from both EC2 and CDN was put together side by side for a visual comparison. In EC2 case the video download was made through a 206 HTTP method that suggests the file was stripped into chunks resulting in different requests for the same data. In CDN case the server also utilizes 304 HTTP method taking advantage of cache. Furthermore CDN sent more bytes (2.3MB) during the page load. EC2 sent just 824kB.

 

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