Content Delivery Network: What is It and How Does It Work?

What is a CDN?

Content Delivery Network or CDN is a vital aspect of online business strategy. Whether you know it or not, you are interacting with CDNs regularly. You interact with CDN when you read something on news sites, shop online, scroll through your social media feeds and watch videos on YouTube.

Here you will get to learn more about the content delivery network and how it works.

Content Delivery Network is a universally distributed network of Points of Presence or web servers whose main aim is to offer faster content delivery. The content is stored and replicated throughout the content delivery network. This makes sure that the users can access the data which is stored at a location that is closest to the user, geographically. It is different than the conventional method of storing content on a central server. The client gets access to the data copy close to the client in contrast to all clients assessing a central server. This helps in avoiding bottlenecks in the server.

You might already know that if content loads faster, it offers a better user experience. So, when all data is located in one server, limited loading speed affects the user experience adversely. More is the distance between two communicating objects, longer it will take for the content to reach the objects.

In simple terms, the basic purpose of CDN is to enhance user experience and offer efficacious network resource utilization. E-commerce vendors or media companies providing content to users are paying CDN operators for delivering content to their end-users. A CDN pays the internet service providers, network, and carrier operators for hosting servers in the data centers they have.

Benefits of Using a Content Delivery Network

How Does a Content Delivery Network Work?

For reducing the distance between the website server and the visitor, a content delivery network stores the cached version of the content in various geographical locations. Every point of presence consists of several caching servers that are responsible for content delivery to the user within its proximity.

CDN can put your content in various locations simultaneously. So, your users enjoy superior coverage. For instance, someone from London accesses the US-hosted website you have, it will be done through a locally UK point of presence. It is quicker than the users requesting for it and waiting for your response. Thus, the time required for the transmission to the entire distance of the Atlantic and reaching back to the user gets saved.

So, this is how CDN works. CDN can offload the traffic that is served directly from the origin infrastructure of the content provider, and this helps in cost saving for the provider.

CDN provides optimal web performance, irrespective of where the end-user is located. All global businesses should use this. In case you are wondering why you should use it, take a look at the benefits it offers.

Boost Response Time

A successful website results from high conversion and growing sales. Speed and latency problems can cripple an online business and lead to several damages. Even a few seconds can be the difference between a bounce and a successful conversion. A content delivery network makes sure that the load speed is better than optimal. This, in turn, ensures that transactions can be made seamlessly.

Save Money

By hiring a CDN, you will be able to save a lot for your business. Instead of investing in infrastructure and various service providers around the works, just get a global CDN. This will make sure that you don’t have to pay for expensive foreign hosting. So, you can save a lot of money. A global CDN will provide you with one platform to manage different operations working across different regions for an affordable price. In case you have a tight budget, CDN is the best option for you.

Global Reach

More than 1/3rd of the population browses the internet. The number just keeps on increasing with time. CDN offers solutions through cloud accelerations with a local point of presence. The global reach takes out the latency issue that can lead to slow load times or interrupts long-distance online transactions.

Decrease Server Load

The CDNs strategic placement is capable of reducing the server load on interconnects, private and public peers, and backbones to free up the overall space and reduce delivery cost. The content spread out on different servers as opposed to offloading them into a big server.

Segmented Audiences

A CDN can deliver various types of content to various users based on the type of device that is requesting the content. It can detect the type of device (mobile, laptop, tablet) and provide device-specific content.

Higher Availability

CDN can distribute assets to the cores, edge, and fallback servers that are strategically placed. Content Delivery Networks offer better control over asset delivery and network load. It can optimize the capacity per customer, offer statistics and views on real-time loads. It displays popular assets and show active regions to the customers. So, CDNs provide 100% availability, even when there are hardware or network outages.

Almost everyone uses CDN. At present, more than half of all internet traffic is being served by a content delivery network. The numbers are only growing every day. The truth is, when any part of a business is online, there is no reason not to use CDN.

However, not everyone can use CDN. In case you are running a localized website, and most of your users are located in the same location where you are hosting, having a CDN will not prove to be much helpful. In fact, in such a situation, using a CDN worsens the performance of the website.

Commercial CDNs are being used since the 90s. However, just like every other technology, this too has gone through changes and evolved into a strong application delivery platform. Use it to accelerate e-commerce transactions and high graphics video games.