CDN Services, What They Do and How They Work
Content delivery network (CDN) services make it possible to deliver web content to your audience faster than ever before while cutting down on bandwidth costs and making everything more secure. However, many services out there claiming to offer CDN features, which can make choosing the right one difficult. You need to consider several factors before signing up with any of them. In this article, we will explore the basics of CDNs and the services that offer them, so you can make an informed decision about which provider will work best for you and your business’s specific needs.
What is a CDN?
A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centres across the Internet. Its goal is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. The CDN’s Edge nodes are located in major cities on several continents. Major Internet exchanges are also located near these nodes.
How Does It Work?
CDNs provide faster downloads of your content. Let’s say you have a site where most of your visitors are in India. When someone in India clicks on one of your images, that picture needs to download from one of your servers located there. This process takes time: Every bit has to travel through all these different hops until it reaches its destination. If many people visit your website at once, or if everyone is downloading multiple bits simultaneously (as happens when an image is clicked), then traffic can slow down significantly—especially for low-bandwidth regions. Now imagine if you had lots of web servers distributed around India so that people could be getting pieces of that image from various locations at once rather than only being able to rely on one location (or maybe two). That’s essentially what CDNs do.
Benefits of Using a CDN
1) Speed – CDNs will significantly improve your website’s load times for users.
2) Security – Hosting your files on a CDN can keep them safe from DDoS attacks.
3) Uptime – If you use multiple servers to host your website files, using a CDN will help ensure you don’t experience downtime when one server goes down.
4) Scalability – CDNs are designed to scale with their customers, so they can handle significant amounts of traffic if necessary.
5) Reliability – CDNs have high uptime and low latency levels because they have multiple data centres spread out across the globe.
3 Types of CDNs
First, you’ll want to decide whether a third-party CDN provider will fit your business needs or if it makes more sense to set up your own internal CDN. It’s worth noting that there are three main types of CDNs available:
Third-party hosted: These service providers host content on their servers in data centres around the world. When users try to access your content through a third-party hosted network, they’re first directed to request it from one of these servers.
Internal: An in-house option allows you to deploy any piece of software or hardware internally within your network to deliver content.
Proprietary Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): This option is provided by vendors as a SaaS product, which gives companies limited or full control over how content delivery works. SaaS systems are typically built into existing applications, so they may not be as scalable as other solutions depending on how much volume a business requires. There can also be vendor lock-in with proprietary SaaS solutions, so make sure you fully understand exactly what is being offered before signing on for something long term—or anything at all!
Now we believe you are now up to speed with Content delivery networks, how they operate, their types and their benefits!
