What components of your site do you typically "offload" or embed?

Question

Here's what I mean. In developing my ASP.NET MVC based site, I've managed to offload a great deal of the static file hosting and even some of the "work". Like so:

1. jQuery for my javascript framework. Instead of hosting it on my site, I use the Google CDN

2. Google maps, obviously "offloaded" - no real work being performed on my server - Google hosted

3. jQueryUI framework - Google CDN

4. jQueryUI CSS framework - Google CDN

5. jQueryUI CSS framework themes - Google CDN

So what I'm asking is this, other than what I've got listed...

What aspects of your sites have you been able to offload, or embed, from outside services?

Couple others that come to mind...

OpenAuth - take much of the authentication process work off your site Google Wave - when it comes out, take communication work off of your site

Answer 1

In the past I've used Amazon AWS.

Their S3 service was cheap for hosting Images and video.

The EC2 service is also good for additional computational power or just removing load from your server.

In additon to Pay for hosted services you can use Youtube or Vimeo to host videos and they API will allow you to upload and host videos.

There are also APIs for may other services depending on exactly what you're wanting to do. If you looking at adding functionality to your site but without hosting the service it would be worth checking out http://www.programmableweb.com/

Answer 2

Even though Google's CDN has smaller files and faster response times, I'm now using Microsoft's CDN for jQuery. Why? Big Brother.

In some high-security companies, they only allow access to known domains. Users at those companies had problems because their firewalls didn't know googleapis.com, and blocked jQuery. They knew microsoft.com, so ajax.microsoft.com worked.

I've suggested to google that they change their URL from ajax.googleapis.com to something.google.com to avoid the issue in the future.