Website owners that experience an increasing amount of online traffic should consider using a content delivery network (CDN). Below explains what this is and why it’s beneficial.
What is a Content Delivery Network?
According to AppEx Networks, “A content delivery network is a group of strategically located servers that deliver web pages and content to users based on the locations of the specific user, server and web page content. The closer a content delivery network is to the user, the faster the content will be delivered and the better the network will be able to deal with sudden traffic surges.” Content delivery networks work by maintaining website copies that are geographically dispersed to different locations.
Whenever a user requests a webpage, the content delivery network will redirect the request from the original server to an in-network server that is geographically closer to the user. The content delivery network will also download content that previously wasn’t cached from the original server. To illustrate, if the original server is in the U.S., but the user is in Europe, this will involve hundreds of individual requests to load objects such as images and content.
What are the Advantages of a Content Delivery Network?
Users should expect faster website load times from their content delivery network. This is especially true for large content delivery networks that have a geographically diverse system of server. In fact, the largest content delivery networks maintain servers all over the world. Website speed doesn’t just involve time, but also bandwidth and availability. The technical term is latency, which refers to the amount of time it takes for the original server to receive, process, and deliver the webpage content. Latency mostly depends on the distance between the user and server, but this is complicated by the total number of resources that a web page contains. However, most content delivery networks guarantee 100 percent availability even with power outages and network problems.
Business owners should expect a content delivery network to improve overall speed, but this also depends on the general location of users. Therefore, business owners must carefully select a content delivery network that covers the same geographic region as the majority of their users. Bear in mind that a content delivery network is very beneficial for global websites, but unnecessary for a local website with simple needs. Business owners shouldn’t expect a content delivery network to increase speed for mobile users because mobile technology is still being integrated into these systems. Finally, the one thing that all business owners should expect from a content delivery network is a substantial monthly fee, which is why over half of all e-commerce businesses do not use content delivery networks.
To wrap up, content delivery networks are a great way to increase speed and availability, but they are expensive.
