One of the last things to tackle for the moment is setting up and managing a CDN or Content Delivery Network.
Before picking a CDN provider I needed to get an estimate on how much traffic the site was using. Luckily there's a console based network traffic monitor for Linux called vnStat.
To enable vnStat just requires one command;
vnstat -u -i eth0
Checking the estimate using vnstat -d showed that we'd be sending about 300GB this month, yikes.
rx | tx | total
estimated 345.95 MiB | 9.04 GiB | 9.37 GiB
But thankfully after a few days of gathering data the estimate became a more reasonable 120GB per month.
➜ ~ vnstat --months
eth0 / monthly
month rx | tx | total | avg. rate
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
Jun 16 3.50 GiB | 119.66 GiB | 123.17 GiB | 398.61 kbit/s
Jul 16 6.51 GiB | 147.34 GiB | 153.85 GiB | 481.84 kbit/s
Aug 16 3.94 GiB | 62.99 GiB | 66.93 GiB | 209.62 kbit/s <- CDN enabled here
Sep 16 20.39 GiB | 31.93 GiB | 52.32 GiB | 182.52 kbit/s
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
After doing some searching and consulting with Nicole, we decided to give MaxCDN a try. Their 9$ for 100GB looked to be a reasonable price for the amount of traffic the server was receiving.
The entire process from signing up to enabling the CDN was super easy and only required 2 settings to be configured.
The only step that wasn't required was adding a CNAME DNS entry for cdn.bittenbythetravelbug instead of [long hash].netdna-cdn.com, this keeps things tidy and well presented to end users who snoop around the sites source code.
