A Deep Dive Into AKSELA
Everything You Need To Know About The Website Acceleration Tool: AKSELA
In the era of 5G communication, speed really matters. If you have a slow-performing application like a website, your customers will probably land somewhere else causing you loss of revenue. This performance issue, on the other hand, will impact your customer experience and this, directly or indirectly, will impact your conversion rate.
Many businesses invest huge amounts of money to accelerate their sites and improve their performance. This investment may include costly servers or storage deployment in your infrastructure.
In this article, we are going to introduce our micro-caching website acceleration service called AKSELA.
What is Aksela and How does it work?
Aksela is a micro-caching website acceleration tool developed by Medianova and it aims to speed up the performance of your website by caching your dynamic content in a distributed manner and serving them to your end-users from closest locations.
Static contents are the same for all visitors and rarely changed contents which can include JavaScript, CSS, HTML, images, images and videos.
Dynamic content is content which is created on the fly by the webserver. It might be completely different for different visitors, or even for the same visitor, reloading the page at a different time. This is obviously a necessity for websites which allow visitors to submit their own content, but it’s also useful for websites like blogs where the content editor wants to be able to easily change the website’s content without having to fiddle with HTML files for every change.
Dynamic websites usually consist of a mixture of dynamic and static content. The distinction matters because static content can be cached, so visitors will not have to download it every time they load a page.
Aksela will come handy here by its caching capability. Aksela uses Medianova’s distributed caching architecture. It will cache your dynamic contents in different locations and by doing so, it will reduce the latency between your end-users and your content. It also gives you the feature to cache your content for a short period of time. This feature is very important in news or OTT platforms with the same functionality, where the content needs to be constantly updated and webpages that deliver personalized content.
What Are The Benefits of Using Aksela?
We are going to introduce the benefits of Aksela here without getting into technical details since it’s out of the scope of this article.
Many applications try to keep their latency low to improve the QoE of their clients. As we explained earlier, using Aksela you can serve your static content from our distributed caching platform, and let only your dynamic content to be served from your origin servers. This, due to the distributed architecture of our platform will improve your performance, reduce your latency and it will help you improve your SEO.
Using Aksela will also help you cope with DDoS attacks such as Flash Crowd attack (FCA). In a traditional scenario, your origin is responsible for answering all the requests to your application. But deploying Aksela in front of your origin server will take over this responsibility somehow and will let your origin feel relieved.
Also, Aksela provides you with the option to serve a stale version of your site to your client when your origin is out of order. This process will increase your availability and will let you gain time to investigate the problem while your clients are being served with a stale version of your site, instead of a hideous error page.
In addition to all these benefits, Aksela also provides you with some front-end optimization tools such as rewriting your JS or CSS files, collapsing whitespace in your HTML code, removing comments, etc.
How can you make the transition to AKSELA?
Transition to Aksela is quite easy and straightforward. There are several ways you can start using Aksela on your website. It’s actually a matter of preference, but the easiest way to start using Aksela is to forward us your origin’s IP address. Later we will provide you an Aksela Service URL which you need to define this URL as a CNAME for your origin, and that’s all. Your website now is all being cached and served through our platform. There are several configurations you can do to define which sections to cache, in which periods cache updating happens, etc. But the overall transition to Aksela and the way to benefit from it is not as hard as it might sound!
How is Aksela different from other site acceleration services?
Most of the site acceleration tools available in the market focus on the front-end optimization of your website. These tools heavily depend on the technology you use behind your app and the contents you have. You can do this kind of optimization to accelerate your website on your own. However, Aksela provides you with a distributed architecture which not only provides you with front-end optimization but also gives you this luxury to cache your static contents on their CDN infrastructure and serve them from the closest places to your clients. It also caters you with micro-caching capability which is a valuable feature, because the caching period and its TTL may affect your website negatively in some cases. But being able to choose a very small portion of time is a great thing to have.
Get in touch with our Tech team if you are curious about AKSELA, we’ve got your back with instant support to help you get a taste of an accelerated and high performing website.
