As part of our ongoing efforts to improve website experience, speed, and Core Web Vitals scores, Duda now has a set of servers that deliver Duda websites from servers based in Europe. By having a set of servers in the EU, we are able to have the first response time (also known as Time to First Byte, TTFB) faster for site visitors that are closer to the EU. 

We silently rolled this out a few weeks ago and are already seeing a big decrease in loading times for visitors coming to sites from the EU. 

This new European server also adds an additional layer of resiliency to the Duda platform. If the primary US data center goes down, all website traffic will be routed to the cached version in the EU until the US data center comes back online. This also works in reverse, if the European layer goes down, traffic will get routed to the US, too.

How this works

Duda has set up a new service that caches a version of the live web page in the European region. This takes our existing caching infrastructure and places it in Europe, in addition to the United States. We are then able to route traffic from site visitors coming to the website to either the US or EU data center automatically, based on which is closer. 

But Duda already uses a global CDN?

Yes, this is true! It’s important to note that websites are delivered in two ways: There’s the primary HTML document that’s downloaded and then all the other assets within the website, like images, videos, javascript files, etc.. 

Before this European caching server, Duda only responded with the HTML from the United States. By delivering the primary page HTML from a closer server, we are able to speed up the all-important first render time of the website even more. 

All other assets (images, videos, javascript files, etc..) are already on the global CDN and this is not changing. 

Some caveats

It’s important to take a minute and make sure we’re clear on what this is and what this is not. 

• Your website files are still primarily hosted in the US. The primary source of data is in the US-East-1 location of AWS. This is not changing. This new caching server only serves a short-term version of your website in Europe – the content is still primarily hosted in the US.
• This change affects customers on our Primary US instance. If you’re not sure what instance you’re on, then you are almost certainly on the Primary US instance.