A Content delivery/distribution networks are highly distributed servers that are optimized to deliver content including web applications and streaming media. These geographically distributed servers work together to deliver quick transfer of files needed for loading Internet content including HTML file, images, videos Javascript files and many more.
Today majority of the web traffic is served through CDNs, including traffic from major websites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon. The CDN acts as an intermediary between a content server also known as the origin and its end users or clients. Without the CDN, the content origin server would respond to every single end user request resulting in significant traffic to origin servers and peaking load, thereby increasing the changes of packets lost and failure of the origin server.
CDNs are usually designed to solve the latency issue, as it is very annoying for the customers/visitors surfing or purchasing on any website that loads very slow and is delayed in response. The delay caused is affected by many physical distances/hops between the origin and the destination server. A CDN plays a role here in shortening these distances/hops with a goal to deliver the requested content in a shorter span of time. Let us learn more how it works.
How does a CDN work?
As stated earlier, a CDN is a network of servers linked together with the motive of delivering content quickly, cheaply, and securely to its destination server/user. To improve speed and connectivity, a CDN will place servers at the exchange points between different networks. These internet exchange points are the primary locations where different Internet providers connect to provide access to the traffic originating from the different networks. Hence connecting to high-speed networks, a CDN can reduce the cost and ensures the high-speed data delivery. A CDN has an optimization on standard client/server data transfer. CDNs are designed to survive various types of failures and Internet connectivity issues and handling congestion. This is how a CDN works in a nutshell!
What are the benefits of using a CDN?
As the CDN usability depends on the size and the need of the company and how it can benefit them, the primary benefits of using a CDN are as follows:
1. Improving website load time: By distributing the content closer to website visitor using a nearby CDN server, the web pages are delivered faster. You can cache the static content like images, videos, and content and server the audience more quickly.
2. Reduce bandwidth cost: As you can cache content and apply optimization techniques through CDN, CDNs can reduce the amount of data consumption, thus reducing the hosting cost.
3. Quick content delivery: Through CDN the content will be delivered to a large amount of traffic. A CDN can handle more traffic and help to reduce the hardware failure at the origin server.
4. Improving website security – A CDN may improve security by providing DDoS mitigation, improvements to security certificates, and other optimizations.
For quite a long time CDNs have formed the unseen backbone of the Internet and delivering the content speedy and securely for the many industry sectors like retail, finance, healthcare and other businesses and individuals.