Over the last month, we have quietly begun enabling a new feature for all of our clients that should dramatically improve their page load times and overall site performance.

There are two primary factors that affect the rate at which web sites load: the speed at which our servers can generate a response, and the time required for that response to get back to the user.  The first factor is fairly easy to optimize; we run high quality code, on high quality servers, in a high quality datacenter.  The second factor, however, has traditionally been tougher to 'tune' -- after all, our clients may be spread out all over the country, but our servers are all still located in Dallas.

That's where our new Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes in.  Here's the basic idea: instead of serving all of our clients sites from our Dallas-based datacenter, we distribute the content to 'virtual' datacenters across the world.  We have CDN servers located in Seattle, San Francisco, LA, St. Louis, Newark, Virginia, and Miami.  For international users, we also are distributing content from data centers throughout Europe and Asia.  When a user sends a request to an application running on our platform, it is automatically routed to the nearest server for processing.  For example: if you're accessing a Goose-powered service from New York City, most of the content delivered to you will be coming from Newark, instead of all the way from Texas.

The best part?  As a program administrator, you don't have to do anything - your CDN is automatically enabled.  Happy surfing!