Speed is a critical element for the success of any website. It is a factor that both end users and the search engine pays a lot of regard to. There are several tactics that you can employ while installing a caching plugin or optimizing your images. This will assist in reducing the overall loading time of your website and increase its speed.
However, you may discover that your website is still sluggish despite all these efforts. At this point, you can now consider the use of the CDN. In this article, I will try to explain to you the whole concept of the CDN. You need to understand how CDN works and its features for you to apply it appropriately. This will assist you to select the best CDN for your website from the long list of CDN service providers that are in the market.
What is a CDN :
The abbreviations CDN stands for Content Distribution Network or Content Delivery Network. It is a composition of several servers that are geographically dispersed and each of them stores cached copies of the statistics copies of the files on your website like the JavaScript files, CSS, videos, and Images.
Traditionally, websites are hosted on a single server that is located at one geographical location. The implication is that when a visitor is viewing your website, he or she only has one space for pulling the resources.
In addition, the physical distance between your site viewer and your server can have effects on the loading time of your page. Websites that are resource intensive like the ones that publish image-rich content on a regular basis can also affect the loading speed.
Basically, a CDN will cache and store the relevant site files on multiple servers that are located in several data centers and positioned in various places all over the world. The data centers are also referred to as the (PoPs) points of presence and they are optimized in such a way that they communicate with the website viewer that is close to them. Therefore, the visitor will not be requesting the data from your website but rather the CDN PoPs that is close to him or her. This will not only increase the loading speed but also decrease the bandwidth consumption. You need to look at the location and cost while choosing the most appropriate CDN for your website.
The Content Delivery Network(CDN) can be referred to as an elevated technology. The CDN solution strives to maximize bandwidth for data accession from the closely located servers in place of getting at a central server. This shortens the logged jam at the one central serves. This feature is helping many computers to act as servers by having the same copy of data. This is helping many people across the globe to have faster access towards data even during peak download hours. This will avoid jamming which usually occurs in case of maintaining a single central server. This technique clearly shows that the presence of single central server is completely outdated.
How Does a CDN Work?
An effective and efficient CDN solution is bound to offer its users an exciting ecosystem environment and platform for their websites as well as blogs, irrespective of their size of operations. Many CDN providers in the industry offer the CDN solution that very conveniently organizes everything from substructure supply through to routing of traffic and service selling for the users. There can be numerous hosts under a CDN network situated at various strategic locations worldwide. When a user requests for a particular website, the latter is loaded onto the server, which would be finest to the user geographically. The loading time is very less since all the requested information is made available to the user from the nearest server. Irrespective of the nature of the content of the website in terms of images, audio and video, the CDN network ensures the website loading is always sped up. Companies depending on single server system will have to wake up in order to get the new technology. Many multinational companies are maintaining their own content delivery network system within the company network rather than depending on any third party providers. On the other hand, there are many third-party providers functioning with the aim of providing the CDN service to all the required firms to help their customers to access data without much trouble.
There are many factors that have to be taken cared while selecting CDN service. The main factor is the determination of the customer base. You should take the pain to determine the geographical location of all the clients for the company. If your clients are spread all over the world, then definitely you should think
about designing a larger structure for your CDN.
Most of the customers in the network will be downloading various streaming media video, audio files or even large text document which can cause delay during peak traffic hours in case of centralized server. As a result, the quality of the downloaded file will be compromised leading to poor visibility of the video files. All these problems can be overcome by using content delivery networks. There are many companies offering CDN service and you can select one according to your budget and also after looking on to the given features. The number of computers required for the CDN will also vary with respect to the positioning of the client. As a result of using CDN facility, you will never come across a situation where your website will be down due to any server issues. Even if some computers fail to function correctly, the failure will be adjusted by checking on with the other computers working on the same network.
Conclusion :
I want to believe that the content of this article will help you to make informed decisions when searching for CDN service providers.
