What is CDN? A complete guide on CDN, benefits, uses and much more !
Have you at any point thought about how some of those renowned websites figure out how to deliver their content to you so rapidly and reliably – regardless of where the organization is found and regardless of where you happen to be connected? In most circumstances, the correct answer isn’t one gigantic dedicated server with huge internet bandwidth. It is most likely to be the utilization of a content delivery network (CDN).
If your web presence is beginning to produce genuine interest and traffic, particularly from different parts of the world, it very well might be an answer that makes sense for you to supply your content to an increasing number of fans or customers.
What is a CDN?
A content delivery network CDN will convey web content and other web pages based on their geographic location, providing its users with a high-speed experience. This is all possible by using an extensive distributed system of servers that are deployed in several data centers across the globe. The more closer the CDN server is to the user geographically, the more swiftly the content will be delivered to the user.
How Does A CDN work?
To reduce the distance between the visitors and your website’s server, a content delivery network stores a cached version of its data in multiple geographical locations A.K.A PoPs (points of presence). Each PoP consists of several caching servers that are liable for content delivery to website visitors within its proximity.
In short, CDN displays your content in many places at the same time, providing superior coverage to your website users. For instance, when someone in London, accesses your Pakistan- hosted website, it is done by a local Uk PoP (point of presence). This proves to be much quicker than having the visitor’s requests, and your responses, travel the full width of the Atlantic and back.
According to a recent study, a seconds-long delay causes an 11%drop in page views, a 7% drop in conversions, and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction.
This is typically how a content directing network works in a nutshell. There is, however. a lot of detail on the topic which you can explore if you are eager to learn about it in detail.
What Is The Use Of A CDN?
A CDN delivers the digital content to the visitors on a website efficiently. It doesn’t matter where you live in the world. By using a CDN, you can receive information from a website of a different country within seconds. In studies, Page Time Load goes from 1s to 3s – the probability of bounce increases 32%.
In order to carry out the whole process efficiently and effectively, a CDN has to consider two major factors.
- Geographical distance:
When a client visits your website from any part of the world, it is ideal that the server closest to them delivers and displays your content. That is because the closer the server is, the faster the content will be delivered and accessible by the client.
- Increasing traffic:
Imagine that you run a website that sells skin care products and you have just launched your “End of the season sale.”
As the sale starts, your server goes offline due to a surge of traffic, and your website is now inaccessible to your clients. According to a recent survey, Shoppers often become distracted when made to wait for a page to load. 14 percent will begin shopping at another site, and 23 percent will stop shopping or walk away from their computer.
Well, to prevent a situation like this you must have a CDN. A CDN distributes the traffic across multiple servers, reducing the load on your origin server and keeping your site online.
CDN’s are of utmost importance for improving the overall performance and speed of websites that have a global reach and for those websites that experience high traffic regularly.
What Are The Benefits of Using a CDN?
- Reducing Bandwidth Costs:
The primary expense for a website comes from the bandwidth consumption costs for website hosting. Through caching and other optimizations, content delivery networks can cut down the amount of data an origin server must provide, thus reducing the costs of hostings for website owners.
- Improving website security:
A similar process by which CDNs handle traffic spikes makes it ideal for moderating DDoS attacks. These are attacks where malicious actors overpower your origin servers or applications by sending a huge number of requests. At the point when the servers goes down because of the volume, the downtime can influence the site’s availability for its clients.
A CDN goes about as a DDoS protection and mitigation platform,with the edge servers and GSLB distributing the incoming load equally across the entire capacity of the network. CDNs can likewise provide certificate management, automatic certificate renewal, and generation.
- Improving Website Load Times:
By dispersing content closer to website visitors by utilizing a nearby CDN server (among other optimizations ), visitors encounter faster page loading times. As visitors are more prone to click away from a slow-loading website, a CDN can increase the time duration that people spend on the website by reducing bounce rates.
In other words, a faster website ensures more visitors will stay and stick around longer.
- Increasing Content Availability and Redundancy:
A lot of web traffic or hardware failure can interfere with normal website functioning which ultimately leads to downtime. Because of their distributed nature, a CDN can deal with more web traffic and withstand hardware failure better than most of the origin servers.
On the off chance that one or more of the CDN servers go offline for unknown reasons, other operational servers can pick up the web traffic and keep the service continuous.
Is It Safe To Use A CDN?
Like most digital tools, however, the rewards also come with risks. Unlike Firewalls, content delivery networks cannot block bad bots from infecting a website on their own. CDN servers that contain cached data can be seized and misused in several other ways.
On the off chance that a hacker gains access to cached information on the CDN that multiple organizations use, for instance, the private information of each business customer would become vulnerable. Cybercriminals could get their hands on email addresses, credit card passwords, and other sensitive information through the CDN.
Distributed denial of service attacks is another rising CDN security concern. A simulated test revealed that 16 different CDNs were at risk of an exploit that caused servers to run the same instructions on repeat. In the end, they became overloaded, taking the content offline.
How to Ensure CDN Security?
Though the use of CDNs is accompanied by security risks, they are a vital factor for any website owner who wants to bring in visitors from overseas and deliver a seamless and hassle-free user experience. This does not mean websites need to be left at risk, however. There are some necessary steps you can take to ensure your CDN usage does not compromise the security of their visitors.
- Become compatible with SSL certificates.
- Use a web application firewall.
- Evaluate CDN carefully.
What Are The Best CDN?
- Cloudflare:
Cloudflare is one of the most popular content delivery services that are user-friendly and also offers expert-level features and functionality.
The option of web filtering can limit content spam, mitigate DDoS attacks, block bots and keep you safe from hackers.
The clever page rules help you to manage traffic. The REST API allows developers to take full control of what the service is doing, providing flexibility.
Upgrading to pro-plan costs around 20$ with added extra configurability, image optimization rules, and improved support.
- Amazon CloudFront:
Amazon CloudFront is a part of the many services that Amazon provides. CloudFront, as expected, also provides a wide range of features. It is highly configurable as you can customize a lot of things such as enabling automatic GZip compression for more speed.
You can also view the details of your website visitors’ device type, OS, and much more.
On the downside, it is slightly less user-friendly for a beginner, and calculating costs can be a tricky task if you don’t have much idea about CDN.
- Microsoft Azure CDN:
Microsoft Azure is a large old sack of integrated cloud tools for managing applications and services and also for building them. Among the wide range of services they offer, CDN is also a part of it.
With Microsoft Azure CDN, you get a dashboard that is packed with features. The performance levels are impressive. At the time of writing, it is the sixth-fastest content delivery network in the US and fifth worldwide, according to CDN Perf. However, it is not particularly user-friendly for beginners.
FAQ:
- Is CDN the same thing as a web host?
No! A CDN does not host content and cannot replace the need for proper web hosting. However, it does help cache content at the network edge, which ultimately improves website performance. Many website owners struggle to have their website performance needs to be met by traditional hosting services, which is why they opt for content delivery networks.
- What am I billed for in my CDN?
When using a CDN, you are only billed for your bandwidth according to your CDN network provider. No charges will be billed if your CDN does not use any bandwidth. It is important to keep in mind that bandwidth prices may vary depending on the regional location of the edge server.
- Is there any recommended browser for a CDN service configuration?
Yes, Google Chrome and Firefox are the recommended browsers. It is recommended that you use the latest versions with your selected CDN for a smooth experience.
- What is the purpose of providing a path when creating my CDN?
If you provide a path while creating your content delivery network, it permits you to isolate the files and folders that can be served through CDN from a particular origin server.