using CloudFront to deliver product images

[ozlighting]

Hi,

we've been a little frustrated with poor performance (pages loading quite slowly). Our pingdom response time reports show average response times of between 1000ms and 1200ms. We are on a dedicated server with Drundo - a company with significant expertise hosting AbleCommerce stores. They have assured us that the server we're on is completely optimised for AbleCommerce stores and that the server itself is performing well (plenty of memory and CPU). They have also said that most of their other AbleCommerce customers on similar servers get around 800ms response times, sometimes as low as 600ms. We are therefore exploring the option of hosting our product images on amazon S3 and serving them using Amazon cloudfront. In theory this should speed up the site because the images make up a significant amount of the bandwidth of most pages and they will be cached in a location that is closer geographically to where most of our site visitors are (our current server is in USA but most of our visitors are in Australia).

Has anyone here had any experience serving their images with cloudfront? if so, what were the results? did it make a significant improvement? Did you encounter any issues/challenges? and what about the costs?

any feedback on cloudfront or any similar content delivery system with AbleCommerce would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Lance

[AbleMods]

Talk to Rusty at Mindfly.com, he has experience doing it with AC7.

Tell him Joe Payne sent 'ya