Hosting A Website On Webserver Vs Hosting on CDN?

Question

I found out recently that it's possible to host a website completely on a CDN and I was wondering what are some pros/cons to hosting on Rackspace CDN instead of a Website?

My website is static so I don't see why it couldn't be done.. the only thing that I'm not sure about is if I could still use an .htaccess file.

If my website is static could all I need be done on a CDN? Is there a way to use the .htaccess file still?

Answer 1

If your web site is completely static files, you could certainly use a CDN to host it.

Pros:

• Relatively easy to setup; usually being able to publish files using something like a FTP client.
• Scalable with low latency for end-users. CDNs deploy the files to their edge nodes around the globe. This means your web site files will be closer (in terms of network latencies) to your end-users. This results in faster downloading of these files (i.e. your web site) for the end-users.

Cons:

• Making your web site dynamic later might require some amount of work - separating static files from dynamic files, publishing static files to CDN and dynamic files to web server, ensuring that static files are published on CDN before they are referenced from other parts of your web site, etc.

See http://www.rackspace.com/blog/point-and-click-your-way-to-a-cloud-files-static-website-with-the-control-panel/ for a detailed walk through on how to setup a static web site using Rackspace Cloud Files CDN.