Here we go…another web acronym that you should know.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an essential way to optimize the performance and availability of your website. In a nutshell, a CDN will provide multiple sources of your website files located on servers all over the world so they are closest to the user accessing them. This means that the user will be issued the site at lightning speed because the CDN will determine which location to issue the files from.
Here’s an example – Say your website files are hosted on a server in Toronto and someone is trying to access them from Los Angeles. They will have pull across the country to gain access to the files which could cause slower load times for your content. If your site was on a CDN then instead of trying to access the site from the server in Toronto, the CDN will make an assessment based on location, availability, cost, and other metrics so it can point them to an optimal server that will issue the site much quicker.
Some of the amazing advantages of a CDN are:
- Better Performance
- Increased Availability
- Cost savings for high volume traffic being offloaded on localized servers
- Isolation of attacks to localized servers
A Content Delivery Network is becoming essential to the user experience for global websites and multinational corporations who have access points across the globe. Hopefully this helps you understand the benefits of this service and how it might help your organization.
