Page load speed heavily affects user experience. If a page doesn’t open within three seconds, users start closing it and giving up. To speed things up, in 2013 I separated the site’s images and other static resources and built a new site — a CDN distribution site. At first I used Baidu Jiasule’s free CDN, which had more bandwidth than my own virtual host, but its acceleration still couldn’t compare with Tencent’s QZone. Then I switched to a more professional paid CDN provider, VeryCloud; the speed-up was obvious and I was fairly satisfied, but still not on par with QZone. Then I found the more professional and powerful Alibaba Cloud, though it’s paid.
This migration only routes static-resource requests through Alibaba Cloud; the site’s dynamic requests are still handled by the virtual host. With little content and low traffic right now, a cloud server would be wasteful, and I also didn’t want to change my ICP filing provider. Using Alibaba Cloud OSS, I left behind the traditional virtual host; using Alibaba Cloud CDN in place of the old CDN provider, the speed-up is obvious. A single Alibaba Cloud CDN node responds with 10 Gbps of bandwidth — several times more than VeryCloud, though it may cost a bit more. You might ask: is Alibaba Cloud trustworthy? Is it stable? Alibaba Cloud was founded with investment from the Alibaba Group. On November 11, 2010, Alibaba Cloud successfully supported Taobao’s Singles’ Day, guaranteeing over 2.4 billion page views of normal access and transactions, plus over 6 million simultaneous online Wangwang users, served by a cluster of 100 machines. So Alibaba Cloud also backs Taobao and Tmall, which makes it very trustworthy. I trust Alibaba and Jack Ma’s team — they have plenty of experience.