For best site performance, it is always of great importance if we use CDN (Content Delivery Network) to host our website’s static content – like images, CSS and JavaScript files – since it effectively reduces the physical distance between the user’s browser and your content.
According to Yahoo!, A CDN is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is the one with the fewest network hops.
Several services provide Content delivery for websites. These services include Amazon S3 and MaxCDN etc but you can use Dropbox as your CDN service thus avoiding any other paid options for this purpose.
Although, Amazon S3 is among the most cost-effective CDN for hosting Wordpress files but if you are not on S3 yet, Dropbox service as a CDN to serve the static files of your Wordpress blog would be a suitable option to start with.
How?
Dropbox CDN is a Wordpress plug-in that helps you do the task easily. It Allows you to upload your themes CSS, JavaScript, and Images into your Dropbox 'Public' folder and server these files from the Dropbox network, thus reducing the bandwidth the server and making your site fast loading for a better user experience.
It works something like this.
You create a sub-folder in your Dropbox Public folder and replicate your Wordpress theme folder structure here.
Next grab the URL of this public folder, pass it to the Dropbox CDN plugin and it takes care* of everything else.
How much effective is this?
Will this really help to boost the performance? Amit Agarwal did a comparison of several CDN services like Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google CDN and Dreamhost to compare the loading speed.
And what he found out is that an uncompressed JS file was served from all the four servers and the load time of Dropbox turned out to be among the lowest (see the image) that could be related to the fact that Dropbox automatically serves the file with gzip compression.
Is there any bandwidth limits in DropBox?
YES. For free accounts, public folders are limited to 10GB ofbandwidth per day. The limit is raised to 250GB for paid accounts. What that means? Obviously, if you are having a low traffic website or blog, IT will not change the things and Dropbox will perform seamlessly but if your site/blog is a high traffic blog, Dropbox will show 404 Error page when it a exceeds the bandwidth limit i.e., The links are automatically suspended if any of your files exceed that limit.
For the sake of understanding, let us say you have a single-page website hosted on Dropbox and the entire weight of all the images, CSS and other static files served through that page is around 500 kb. That means the page should have less than 20k impressions in a day for you to stay within the Dropbox limit and for your website to run properly.
Take care of this fact when using (or abusing!) the Dropbox service.
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Go to Dropbox if you are not using this free file storage service yet.