WPX XDN (CDN): Why does your website need it?

Not sure what a CDN (Content Delivery Network) is?

Put simply, using a CDN is like having a server near any of your site visitors to help load and run your website faster and more efficiently for them, even for visitors from the other side of the world.

For example, let’s say that you’re a nature photography blogger based in Montana, USA, and your website is hosted with WPX in our Chicago datacentre. That site will load well across North America but nature lovers visiting your blog from Australia, Europe, Asia, and Africa will find that your website is slow to load for them.

This is because your blog’s content (images and text mainly) is being retrieved from one of our Chicago servers and sent across the world to visitors outside the USA.

Instead, our CDN (XDN) has already copied your popular content to servers worldwide to benefit your far-away site visitors. So whether your visitors are from Berlin, Sydney, Johannesburg, or Tokyo, they’ll see your blog content from a fast local XDN end-point and not from the other side of the world.

Using our XDN, the speed increase for site visitors around the world is dramatic.

But isn’t the XDN just like any other CDN?

Actually no.

Unlike most CDNs, our XDN was custom-built from the ground up BY us (a hosting company!) specifically FOR high-performance WordPress hosting.

So what exactly is this WPX XDN?

The WPX CDN (Content Delivery Network), now called XDN, is our own superfast, hand-built Content Delivery Network with over 37 ‘end points’ (and growing!) around the world.

Recently, our CDN platform had a massive upgrade on the software side and we have renamed it our XDN (eXceptional Delivery Network) as our XDN enabled our victory for global average speed in all entered categories in these independent tests.

Plus, we test and tweak our XDN constantly for maximum WordPress performance and that’s something that conventional CDN companies (who are not hosting companies) can’t or simply won’t do.

That’s why speed tests show how sites hosted on our XDN completely surpass other CDN-powered hosting companies when it comes to raw speed! 

If you wish to enable and use our WPX XDN on your websites, follow this guide.

Is the XDN free for all WPX customers?

The WPX XDN can be used for all live sites on all types of hosting plans that we offer. From the date of its launch, our XDN has been freely available for all WPX Hosting customers across all plans: Business, Professional, and Elite.

Will the XDN work with every kind of website?

Yes, but some sites benefit much more from a CDN than others. For instance, if you have a typical WordPress blog with images, text, and forms, or even a portfolio site (for photographers or artists), then the WPX XDN will massively accelerate your page’s loading speed.

However, if you have a website with bespoke or dynamic elements, like an eCommerce site with individual shopping carts, then the XDN won’t help as much because those dynamic elements can’t be cached by our XDN.

Long-time WPX customers will know that we have been recommending W3 Total Cache with our custom settings to improve the performance of websites. With the XDN, the W3TC plugin IS still recommended, using our optimal settings.

How will the use of the WPX XDN affect the bandwidth allocation?

It won’t.

After activation, your website will benefit and reduce its previous bandwidth consumption.
The XDN only changes where and how your site content is served to visitors to your websites, as well as how quickly.

Plan limits for bandwidth are unchanged.

Where are the WPX XDN endpoints around the world?

Here is a list of the current end-point locations of the WPX XDN. The list will expand in the future.

1. New Jersey/New York, USA (x2)
2. Chicago, USA (x2)
3. Dallas, USA
4. Seattle, USA
5. Los Angeles, USA (x2)
6. Ashburn, USA
7. Atlanta, USA
8. Silicon Valley, USA
9. Miami, USA (x2)
10. Toronto, Canada
11. Amsterdam, Netherlands (x2)
12. London, UK
13.  Coventry, UK
14. Manchester, UK
15. Frankfurt, Germany (x2)
16. Moscow, Russia
17. Sydney, Australia
18. Paris, France
19. Tokyo, Japan
20. Singapore (x2)
21. Mumbai, India (x2)
22. Johannesburg, South Africa
23. Sofia, Bulgaria
24. Sao Paulo, Brazil
25. Madrid, Spain
26. Seoul, South Korea
27. Melbourne, Australia
28. Stockholm, Sweden
29. Warsaw, Poland
30. Lagos, Nigeria
31. Mexico City, Mexico
32. Fujairah, United Arab Emirates
33. Sandefjord, Norway
34. Hong Kong
35. Santiago, Chile
36. Vienna, Austria
37. Tel Aviv, Israel
38. Islamabad, Pakistan
39. Auckland, New Zealand
40. Bangalore
41. Delhi NCR

If you have any other questions on the topic, don’t hesitate to contact the WPX Support Team via live chat (use the bottom right-hand widget) and they will respond and help within 30 seconds or less.