Normally we set up our WordPress sites for the unicast system. Our servers bear one IP, and DNS also have one primary name server IP. The setup is simple and works great when the users or visitors are within 200 km of the datacenter. Hosting a website on a datacenter on Texus and accessing it from Kolkata adds a huge latency simply because the data have to travel so long path. Although it is astonishingly fast, we get up to 1-second latency.
In today’s world, this latency is not acceptable. To address this issue, the cheapest way is to use a CDN which supports unicast. When we are serving the static content from our CDN thecustomizewindows.cachefly.net then a visitor from Kolkata is getting the JavaScript and Images either from Bangalore or Singapore. This is great to reduce the total page loading time.
The next bottleneck is DNS. When we have a geo-redundant DNS, such as the costlier plans of Rage4DNS or some other paid DNS service, the visitor’s browser from Kolkata is seeking thecustomizewindows.com, and the reply is Bangalore or Singapore. This makes the total response time slightly faster. But the main server in the above example is located in Texas. So the HTML is being delivered from Texas to Kolkata. This alone is increasing the latency at least by 600ms.
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So for normal WordPress installations, when we need to improve the speed, we need to look for a DNS service which supports the GeoDNS feature. Most of the DNS providers advertise that they have anycast support. This confuses many of the customers.
Website in this context is the website operated by the common man, not an IT giant who can have multiple data centers in different countries. Anycast for IPv4 is of no use to the common people who are using WordPress to create and deliver content. Anycast system can not be deployed on a rented server with the IP address we receive as ordinary clients.
So, We Have No Way to Deploy Anycast for Our Websites?
The easiest way to deploy anycast at a fraction of the cost is to host a static site on a CDN. Since our website has been online, we are pointing to this solution. We can easily demonstrate this to you.
CacheFly reverses the proxy of our site to this URL https://thecustomizewindows.cachefly.net. Open https://www.webpagetest.org/ and test the page loading speed from various locations, for example, Japan, New York, London and so on. You’ll always receive a similar page loading time. The reason, as you can understand because the HTML content is delivered from the server closest to the visitor.
At present, the only way to deliver this content (from CDN) from a dynamic site like WordPress is to use a subdomain. That is what services such as Fastly do. The other way, as we have mentioned is hosting a static site directly on a CDN.
The limitations of present technologies are pointing towards headless WordPress, serverless WordPress and so on.
