Offloading All Static Files to Rackspace Cloud Files for WordPress

Offloading All Static Files to Rackspace Cloud Files for WordPress?is not really a smooth work if you have a website with 15 thousands or more static files. So, here is how, we will show you in detail, the detailed method for?offloading All Static Files to Rackspace Cloud Files for WordPress. The process for offloading All Static Files to Rackspace Cloud Files should be accurate and not even a single file, among your 6000+ posts with 15K or more files, for example. It is very tough as if a image file is missed or gets corrupted, visitors will see nothing of that image, as in WordPress, there is no existing way to create a logic so that if there is no corresponding file in CDN or it is corrupted, WordPress can push the file from the main server. This is the biggest problem of both ASP or PHP based CMS. Moreover, only few thinks about offloading all Static Files to Rackspace Cloud Files or any CDN, so number of plugins with hundreds of features are missing.

Why we need offloading All Static Files to Rackspace Cloud Files for WordPress

Offloading All Static Files to any CDN is required :

• Decrease consumption of server resources; Computing Cycles in case of Cloud Servers where the hardware platform is optimized to adapt to supply practically unlimited RAM and CPU power in case of stress. The only one such Hardware Optimized Cloud Server for consumer level use is Rackspace Cloud Sites. The other example is wordpress itself. So, if a scrapper pulls your data, your computing cycle will increase pathetically. By Offloading All Static Files to CDN, the load is decreased somewhat. The usage cost might increase as the bill of CDN is separate, but cost of CDN is less than Computing Cycles. Its impossible to cross the bandwidth range provided by Rackspace Cloud Sites, for a normal website.
• WordPress Cache Plugins do the worse to a server. The page might load fast, but it does a big torture on the server. Offloading All Static Files to Rackspace Cloud Files might reduce the torture a bit as the cache static html files will pull image files from CDN, instead of the main server. Again, Cost of CDN will increase due to effective or ineffective pushing, pulling, deleting updating etc. by the plugins. In other words, honestly I personally do not love cache plugin for WordPress for advanced platform like Rackspace Cloud Files, but it is not possible to manually create static html files for cache purpose for a website with 2K+ posts.

Quite obviously, the image and other static files will load faster than when served from the main server, as –

• CDN by default serves the copy of the static file from geographically closest location of the request – like a browser generated sets of GET requests, like when a visitor from India trying to see this web page. Obviously, a CDN node in Asia is closer to that visitor than that of the main server in U.S. Come on, after all distance matters – the data has no other way to propagate other than those cables under the sea.
• The downloads are parallelized.

Offloading All Static Files to Akamai CDN / Rackspace Cloud Files for WordPress

Step 1 for offloading All Static Files to CDN

WP Super Cache gives far more manual control plus the money things for ‘pro’ help and CloudFlare with blacklisted malware loaded domains are associated with another Cache plugin. WP Super Cache needs a bit hand crafted care but, rely us, it gives the best result for Rackspace. As I said ago, Cache plugins does torture the good servers for bigger blogs with lot of posts. But we need it for apparently good result. Never use DB cache with any HTML cache plugin for Edge servers – it can make the Edge servers to respond inappropriately. Basically these cache plugins are for underpowered servers, core PHP parts are written for old traditional servers and Rackspace will never tell you ?what exact config they use (read Gartner’s) to get the best result in the World. So, a paradoxical phenomenon of getting a slower response, getting blank white page can happen with any of these plugins. Do not install any cache plugin for first few days – let the server understand what it need to do for optimizing the performance after you install WordPress on any advanced Cloud platform. Then follow our?article on configuring WP Super Cache With Origin Pull or Origin Push CDN. Just omit one -?In CDN Sync Tool Plugin, un-tick the ‘Media Library’ option. The plugin will fail if there are over 5K files – its our experience.

Step 2 for offloading All Static Files to CDN

In next step, we will use Cyber Duck, to upload the Media Library to the exact container. Follow this article on Accessing Files Across Cloud Services With Cyber Duck for proper usage of Cyber Duck. ?What you will do is – download the contents of Media Library (uploads) using sFTP software like WinSCP on your hard disk. Then open the container on Cyber Duck, upload in exact locations :

Step 3 for offloading All Static Files to CDN

Now, enable CDN option in WP Super Cache and also in CDN Sync Tool. These will serve dual purpose :

• All your energy for?Offloading All Static Files will come in work, they will load from CDN.
• For new posts or updates, you will not need to update the CDN content manually.

Test whether your?Offloading All Static Files to Akamai CDN / Rackspace Cloud Files for WordPress is successful by testing a post page url on webpagetest.org :