Content Delivery Networks (CDN) is the backbone of how content is delivered by the internet. You might not be aware, but we all interact with CDNs consistently; when perusing articles on news sites, watching YouTube, shopping online, or going through social media feeds.
Regardless of what you do or the content you devour, it is highly likely; you will discover CDNs behind each character of text, each picture pixel, and each film frame that gets conveyed to your PC and internet browser.
To comprehend why CDNs are so broadly utilized, you first need to understand the issue they're intended to tackle. Latency is the irritating delay that happens from the second you click on a webpage to the time it actually displays on the screen.
The delay interval is influenced by various factors, many being explicit to a given web page. In all cases, nonetheless, the delay duration is affected by the actual distance separating you and the server hosting the website.
A CDN's primary goal is to minimize that actual distance, the objective being to improve the rendering speed and performance of the site.
How does a CDN Work?
To shorten the distance between the users and your site's server, a CDN keeps a cached version of the content in different geographical areas, known as points of presence (POP). Every PoP contains several caching servers which are responsible for delivering content to users within its area of proximity.
Fundamentally, CDN places your content in numerous spots at once, giving better coverage to your users. So, for instance, when somebody in New York gets to your UK-hosted website, it is done through a local US PoP. This is a lot faster than having the guest's requests and your responses venture through the whole physical geographic region.
Who uses a CDN?
Basically everybody; today, more than half of all traffic is now being served by CDNs. Moreover, those numbers are quickly rising as time passes. So if any piece of your business is on the web, there are not many reasons not to utilize a CDN, mainly when so many are free of charge.
However, even as a free service, CDNs are not for everybody. If, in particular, you are running a strictly local website, whereby most of your clients are situated in a similar locale as your server, having a CDN yields little to no advantage. In this situation, utilizing a CDN can make your website's performance worse because you have introduced another connection that is unnecessary between the visitor and a server that is already nearby.
Regardless, most websites still utilize CDNs on a larger scale, especially for companies dealing with: E-commerce, healthcare, mobile, advertisement, Government, media and entertainment, and online gaming. If you are interested in CDNs, consider reaching out to an affordable SEO company to help you out.
For your website to perform well, CDNs are non-negotiable except for a website that is meant strictly for local consumption. A CDN is a service most hosting providers' offer as an add-on, and it will not cost you an arm and a leg.
