Introduction to CDN
A Content Delivery Network, or a CDN as it is commonly called, is an essential part of any modern website and application. The content that you view on your phones today, on any website or app, videos or images, or any other kind of content, is very likely to be delivered using a content delivery network.
Understanding a Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery Network or a CDN is a globally distributed network of servers that help provide high availability, faster performance, and security to websites distributing their content via it. The popularity of CDN services continues to grow, and today the majority of web traffic is served through CDNs, including traffic from major sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.
How Does a CDN help in Content delivery?
When any visitor requests for a page from a place miles away from the core server, the round trip time becomes high resulting in slow loading time. This is where CDN comes in. The website fetches cached content from the nearest server (CDN) and delivers it to the visitor locally.
This helps in maintaining the internet speed and reduces traffic and load on the main server. In this way, CDN helps in delivering content faster and efficiently to more users.
Why CDN’s are Required
CDNs not only ensure a faster experience for your users, but they also help to prevent site crashes in the event of traffic surges – CDNs help to distribute bandwidth across multiple servers, instead of allowing one server to handle all traffic. It reduces latency and provides faster loading of the website. CDNs are not necessary to create a webpage but it would be faster with one.
For those with heavy traffic and who are serious about providing the best experience for their users, a CDN should be a crucial part of their budget.
Technical challenges in Developing CDN’s
In the early stages when audiences are small, basic web or video hosting may be sufficient. But, as companies expand and their audience grows, they reach a point where basic hosting fails to deliver the required performance. Challenges such as the inability to support capacity, performance, and features are faced as the business grows. Ensuring the highest core performance is a key challenge for the companies along with optimizing and maximizing performance in the last mile. They have to maintain high inter-region connectivity and adequate delivery capacity in regions close to website visitors. The maintenance and support of the CDNs are also a key technical challenge.
Challenges in implementing a CDN
Operating a CDN presents many different challenges. The underlying goal is to replicate content to many servers. Does this leave many open questions including how to replicate content? where it should be replicated? how a client should find the content? choose a server replica for a particular client? how to direct clients to the server?
Server selection and Content routing are key challenges for a smooth optimization strategy.
Understanding the benefits of a CDN
CDN divides your website traffic among its multiple edge servers that offloads your central servers. Hence, you can sustain the same amount of traffic while operating on less hardware and subsequently decreasing the cost of your infrastructure. An increase in content delivery speed provides customer satisfaction and drives more sales in business. It redirects customers to the available servers from the failed ones thus increasing the website’s uptime. The website can also sustain higher traffic due to additional server capacity. The storage of replicas on different servers minimizes the damage from any of them being down.
But what are the Benefits for the end-users?
Geographical location plays a key role in download speed and latency. The CDN network will receive and distribute traffic loads to the closest available servers. In this way, a strong network of CDNs will not only reduce page load times but also increase data transmission. Whether it’s video streaming, game, or an e-commerce platform, CDNs can provide faster connections to every visitor. Other benefits include secure encryption and less traffic.
Let’s Understand with some Examples
Current technology and traditional web hosting are no longer capable of meeting the demands of websites. A CDN made up of the edge servers that are deployed in different parts of the world now plays a significant role in surpassing the computing resources of traditional web hosting to deliver rich and high-quality multimedia content reliably and cost-effectively.
Castos, a small startup that operates a podcast hosting platform for WordPress, is a great example of this. Castos began by acquiring an existing WordPress podcasting platform with a strong user base. They sought to monetize this popular plugin by offering integrated file storage and delivery. Podcasters could use this all-in-one solution to deliver their content without needing to manage a third-party storage/delivery solution. They selected StackPath’s CDN that offers a flat-rate, pay-as-you-go pricing model, which is suiting them well.
Final thoughts
Anybody who has a website or mobile application that’s likely to be requested by more than one user at a time can benefit from a CDN. They are especially useful to large, complex websites with users spread across the globe, and websites or mobile apps with lots of dynamic content.
