What is Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery/Distribution Network is a network of servers located in strategic geographical regions to store cached content and is used to deliver pages and other Web content to a user, based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and the content delivery server. This ensures that the web content is delivered faster to users regardless of their location relative to the originating server.
How CDN Works
When a user requests a webpage that is part of a content delivery network, the CDN will redirect the request from the originating site’s server to a server in the CDN that is closest to the user and deliver the cached content. CDNs will also communicate with the originating server to deliver any content that has not been previously cached. The process of bouncing through CDNs is nearly transparent to the user. The only way a user would know if a CDN has been accessed is if the delivered URL is different than the URL that has been requested
Benefits of using a CDN
Apart from faster delivery irrespective of the location of the users, there are other benefits of using CDN:
- Lower bandwidth consumption & lower costs:Since the content has been cached at various places, the load on the originating server is reduced. This also helps prevent the possibility of bandwidth limits being breached with your web hosting provider.
- Security: Various security features like DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) mitigation, bot mitigation, WAFs (Web Application Firewalls), spam blocking, bot blocking, TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption, and hacking prevention are built into the CDN. These preventive measures are used to detect and eliminate any threat before it reaches the primary server. This provides an extra layer of security for both the users and the originating server.
- Improved SEO: For SEO, loading speeds are a key factor. Since CDN greatly increases the speed of web page loading, the page will be ranked higher in search results.
- Increased Performance: Since the originating server needs to provide only updated information, it is more performant when some visitors see a sudden increase.
- Reliability: If one server is unavailable, the request is automatically routed to the next available server, ensuring a no-fail setup.
- Dynamic content: Modern CDNs provide dynamic content as well, keeping up the modern day data usage patterns when broadcast-quality video and other dynamic content demands are increasing. Businesses which want to create pages with dynamic content can also use the CDN and not worry about the load on their servers.
- Advanced Analytics: Advanced analytics are built into the CDNs now which provide better insight into network traffic and how the content is being consumed.
- Saves complex infrastructure upgrades for small companies:
