What is Content Delivery Network and Why is it important?

BlogsMarTechWhat is Content Delivery Network and Why is it important?

Content delivery network (CDN), also known as Content Distribution Network is a complex network in charge of content delivery.

Whether you are aware of it or not, everything you load from a popular web service is mostly delivered through CDN.

For example, popular social networking platforms such as Facebook or media service providers such as Netflix use the network to deliver all the content requested by millions of users in the shortest amount of time possible.

The idea behind CDN is to counter latency, the pesky delay interval you experience between requested data and receiving data from a server.

The cause of delay varies on web pages, but generally, it is because of:

  1. The physical distance between you and that websiteโ€™s hosting server. The further you are from the server that serves the content, the longer the delay.
  2. The monstrous traffic is creating congestion and resulting in transmitting web page requests.

Content Delivery Networks can work brilliantly to solve such problems.

How does Content delivery network CDNs Work?

The logic behind using CDNs to minimize the interval time is simple, minimize the physical distance between the content and you, since the distance is one of the primary reasons for the delay, eliminating it should help the speed of delivery.

Hence, CDNs place data centers called PoP, a.k.a point of presence, all around the world to store a cached version of contents in multiple geographical locations, making it physically closer to anyone, anywhere.

For example, when someone in London accesses the California-based media service provider Netflix to watch a movie, they generally go through a local UK PoP.

This is much quicker than having the visitorโ€™s requests to travel across the ocean from the origin server.

Why is it important?

  1. Downtime Protection & Reliability:

Having multiple data centers spread globally ensures easy scalability during sudden spikes in traffic, taking the load off the origin server.

Developers designed CDN architecture to manage a large number of users to access the website without risking the origin server with data overload.

  1. Improved the overall performance of the website:

Points of Presence (PoPs) create a copy of the content and make it available closer to the user. This directly impacts the performance of the website by reducing the latency in data delivery.

  1. Increased Security:

Aside from eliminating latency, CDN users also benefit from increased security with the increased number of servers, a CDN has to offer things such as DDoS attacks security. Most CDN infrastructure can help against such attacks.

  1. Improved SEO:

Google uses speed, among other things, in their ranking; using Content Delivery Network directly improves the SEO ranking of a website. Therefore, it is an essential segment for effective content marketing.

  1. Better user experience

The most important benefit and primary objective of using CDN are ultimately to improve the user experience, with the accelerated speed in delivery of content.

website owners can expect improvement in regular visitors, a decrease in bounce rate, and a higher clickthrough rate for e-commerce sites, which all lead to a higher rate of conversion.

With all its benefits, the decision to use a Content Delivery Network is still not necessarily for everyone, especially for small websites that have yet to gain heavy traffic or those that need highly secured and monitored data.

But if you are building or own a website that attracts high traffic from visitors spread out globally, it is a smart move to allocate your content everywhere closer to your visitors, wherever they are.

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Pros and Cons of CDN (Content Delivery Network) Explained

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