Use Rackspace CDN with a WordPress Site

This article shows you how to use Rackspace CDN with a WordPress® website.

This setup involves the following services:

1. WordPress
2. Rackspace Cloud Files
3. Akamai® Content Delivery Network (CDN)

About WordPress

WordPress is a PHP®-based, blog-centric application that runs on a variety of web servers. WordPress usually runs on either an Apache® or NGINX® web server. WordPress uses a significant amount of memory on servers that have certain configurations.

About Cloud Files

Rackspace Cloud Files is an independent, redundant, cloud-based solution for file storage. Cloud Files uses containers that are limited to 5 GB of storage, but you have an unlimited number of containers available to you.

These files are not directly accessible from any server by default. However, you can use Cloudfuse to mount the files to a server. You can access and manage your Cloud Files by using our Cloud Files application programming interface (API). Utilities like Cloudfuse, Cyberduck®, and FireUploader can all use our API to access the files. You can publish each container to Akamai's CDN on a per-container basis.

About Akamai CDN

Rackspace uses Akamai CDN, which caches content from your servers on a network of Akamai servers (edge nodes) that are distributed across the globe. When a user requests your content, Akamai delivers the cached version from the edge node that is geographically closest to the user, increasing speed and performance. Akamai automatically retrieves new content from your servers and refreshes the cache when the time to live (TTL) expires. Delivering cached versions of your content from Akamai's servers also reduces the load on your own servers.

If you update content on your servers and want Akamai's servers to reflect the change immediately (rather than waiting until the TTL expires), you can use Akamai's purge operation to remove up to 25 objects per day from Akamai's cache. This operation wipes the outdated content from all of the edge nodes that cached it. Because Akamai deploys content globally, purging operations might take some time to propagate.

Use Rackspace CDN with a WordPress Website

To use Rackspace CDN with a WordPress website, you need to take the following steps:

1. Connect your WordPress website to Cloud Files by using the W3 Total Cache plug-in for WordPress. For detailed instructions, see Quick Tip: How to Utilize Akamai CDN with Your WordPress Site.
2. Upload the content to the Cloud Files container that is published to the CDN by using the Cloud Control Panel .
3. Ensure that you have marked your Cloud Files container for publishing to the CDN.

Your WordPress deployment loads the new content.