Why You Need A Content Delivery Network (CDN) for Koha

The server on which are running your Koha instance is located in a single, specific geographic region, even if it is a “cloud” server. This means it will take users who are located in another different geographic location longer to access your Koha library. While this may not be an issue if you are hosting Koha on a local server or using a host who is in the same city or country as your patrons, it may be a bigger problem if you are using a cloud service like Amazon AWS.

Say you are a library located in Zimbabwe and you choose to launch your server in the US-East (Ohio) region instead of the Africa (Cape Town) region, which would be the one closest to you. This saves you money since US-based servers are cheaper (a t3.xlarge server located in Cape Town costs $0.217 per hour vs. $0.1344 per hour for a comparable server in the US) but it comes at the cost of speed for your users. Instead of doubling your server costs and switching regions, you can use a content delivery network (CDN) to serve content faster.

A CDN does the same thing as Apache and Memcached caching does, but on a much larger scale.  It uses proxy servers that are located closer to end users than origin (i.e. your main) servers. The CDN will cache the content from your Ohio-based server and distribute the cache to its own servers scattered around the world, which will likely include your own geographic location. So when a patron logs on to your OPAC, they will likely see cached content served from the CDN’s proxy servers than from your main server. This improves speed of access, security, and the overall reliablity of your servers. I recommend you use Cloudflare – it has a free tier which should be more than enough for most libraries. Setting up a Cloudflare CDN is beyond the scope of this article but I will write a separate one soon so make sure you subscribe to stay up to date with the latest tips and tricks!