Amazon CloudFront CDN and Gzip

[slinc]

We have been using Amazon CloudFront CDN for a couple years now. We are now moving our ecommerce sites over to 3Dcart and would like to move Amazon CDN over with us. I have considered using CloudFlare (note name change) but don't want to move my DNS and not sure it is my best option without a lot of testing. Amazon charges about 12 cents / gb for bandwidth. I can off-load about 50gb of data for less than $10. Can't beat that! It is also super easy to setup.

In our testing so far we have successfully configured Amazon CloudFront with almost all the images on our 3Dcart site (excluding the thumbnail.asp resized images).

The issue we are having is that when moving css, js, pdf, etc files to Amazon CDN we loose the gzip compression. So the images are being served from the CDN but are about twice as large because they are not gziped. Not a good option for performance reasons.

I remember having this issue on my current dedicated windows server and had to make some simple and quick configuration changes to make it work. Amazon CloudFront with IIS7 « Jon Kragh ? Digital Craftsman | Programming, Music & Photography .

My question is, has anyone been able to bypass this issue and get gzip to work using a CDN? If I could get this to work then i could off-load about everything but the html code to Amazon CloudFront.

Does anyone have any other better CDN options they have implemented? Thanks.

[theblademan]

Been using CDN by MaxCDN | Content Delivery Network Services flawlessly for same purpose.

Even changed thumbnail.asp calls to straight image calls from the cdn.

Free SSL.

You can enable gzip as well.

$40 per year for 1 tb transfer. 1 site is included. $12 year to add another site to pool the bandwidth.

$40 year is on sale now for 1/4 or 1/2 off I think, so 20 bucks for the first year.

Might want to check it out.

[elightbox]

Note that if you get rid of thumbnail.asp on the category pages, you will loose the "Quick View" functionality.

Another problem we ran into with Amazon CDN, is images caches do not seem to clear. Whenever we have to change an image, we have to rename it, otherwise the old image continued to be served. Not sure if there is a fix for this too, or if we are doing something wrong.

[theblademan]

We have too much info on the product pages that using product Quick View didn't make sense anyway.

We have it turned on, so the quick cart works, but commented out the call for the popup product quick view button so noone has a chance to push it.

[cbsteven]

Another problem we ran into with Amazon CDN, is images caches do not seem to clear. Whenever we have to change an image, we have to rename it, otherwise the old image continued to be served. Not sure if there is a fix for this too, or if we are doing something wrong.

Amazon checks the source image to see if it has changed once every (IIRC) 24 hours.

[slinc]

theblademan,

Thanks for mentioning MaxCDN. I might give it a try. Are you using their shared SSL certificate on the 3Dcart checkout pages and it works fine (ie. https://yourstore.maxcdn.com)? I chatted with MaxCDN and they thought it would not work if I had my own custom SSL installed also at 3Dcart.

Also, to get rid of the thumbnail.asp did you just resize and upload the required size you needed? Just checking to see if there is another way.

Thanks again.

[elightbox]

Amazon checks the source image to see if it has changed once every (IIRC) 24 hours.

That's what I thought, but that is not the case at least with our site. It seems that when Amazon gets the image, it is permanent for some reason.