Content Delivery Network or CDN is basically a system of networks which deliver the webpages and other web content to the user based upon the user’s geographical location, content delivery sever and the webpage’s origin. In simpler words, CDN is the backbone of the internet which is in charge of delivery of the content. Whether or not we are aware of it or not, each individual interacts on a daily basis with CDN’s. Be it reading articles on a news website to making a purchase online, from going through the social media feed to watching videos on YouTube, CDN comes to use every time.
To be able to understand why the CDN’S are used so widely, one would first need to know about the issue that they have been designed to resolve. Latency is basically that issue. It is that unwanted delay which begins from the moment a web page has been requested to load till the moment the content of the w page appears on the screen. This interval of delay is affected by several factors. In all of the cases here, the duration of delay is impacted by the physical distance between the hosting server of the website and the user. You can get the cheapest CDN for your site to get rid of this issue.
Understanding how CDN works
The main aim of the DN is to lessen the physical distance virtually. This would lead to the improvement of site rendering speed as well as performance. In order to minimize the distance between the server of your website and the user, a CDN would store the cached version of the content in numerous geographical locations or what is referred to as points of presence or PoPs. Each of this PoPconsists of a number of caching servers which are responsible for the delivery of the content to the users which is within its proximity.
So basically a CDN puts the content of your site in multiple places all at once which gives the users a superior coverage. For instance, when a user who stays in London accesses your website which is US-hosted, it would be done through the help of a local UK PoP. This process is actually much quicker than compared to having the users making requests and then your responses travel the entire width of Atlantic and then back.
Advantages of CDN
Implementing the cheapest CDN for your site has many benefits. it would significantly reduce the load time of the webpage which in turn would help in retaining more customers. It helps in providing a more secure network with absolutely no geographical barriers. It would increase the revenue by about 1% for every improvement of 100 ms to the load time of our page.
So, this is how CDN works and it is actually rather beneficial to get a CDN for your site.