Use Google App Engine as a Free CDN to Speed up Your Website

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The speed of the site is important for a better ranking in Google, as well as, for a better experience for your users. CDNs (Content delivery networks) exist for quite a while and they are a very good way to speed your website.
CDNs ares used by the big websites to store static files like: images, style sheets, files to download for a bigger internet speed. The files hosted on a CDN are scattered on the CDN company servers and loaded from the closest location of the visitor.

On the internet you can find other free CDNs but in my opinion they aren’t as good as Google App Engine.  Transforming Google App Engine in a Free CDN, for sure it will bust your page load time for free, also by transforming  Google App Engine in a Free CDN you will take advantage of the servers that Google has ( it is said that Google has more then 40 servers in the entire world).

Google App Engine as a Free CDN Limitations:

Everything has good and bad sides, but in my opinion, transforming Google App Engine in Free CDN for sure it will prove  worthing your time:

• Transferring files – Google App Engine is using Python and Java to transfer files, so, sometimes can make things a little difficult.
• No Software – I wasn’t able to find any software that could help me in easing the file transfer process and configuration.

Google App Engine Free CDN is ideal for the sites that don’t have more then 5000 visitors a day, in case the quotas are higher you can buy extra space for $0.12/GByte for outgoing bandwidth.

Steps to Transform  Google App Engine in a Free CDN:

1. Download and install Python and Google App Engine SDK on your computer
2. Sign up to to Google App Engine , you will need a phone number to do this.
3. Create an Application and give your application a name (called “application identifier”), this needs to be unique.
4. Configure Google App Engine, just open it and go to Edit – Preferences:
5. Create a new application, go to File > Create New Application, Fill Application Name (should be the same as the Application identifier when you create the app engine), then choose where your file will be saved, then create the directories that you want for your files and put some example files there. For example, I have created a directory image and inserted some images there.
6. Edit app.yaml, and put the directory there, mine is like this:

application: cdnbitdoze

version: 1

runtime: python

api_version: 1

handlers:

- url: /images

static_dir: images

Deploy the application,just press the button Deploy on the toolbar.
Check to see if it worked, just go on http://[app-id].appspot.com/images/.
If everything is ok modify the theme to point to the new files location.

More configuration can be done, in the code: I have chosen to do this because it is what I know for know, below you can find some similar articles that can also help you:

• Art 1
• Art 2
• Art 3

Conclusions

I have been  using Google App Engine Free CDN for a couple of days on my site, and the performance enhancement that is bringing is notable.  Just configure Google App Engine as a Free CDN and tell me if it helped.