Benefits of CDN

Why use a CDN?

CDNs are used to improve web performance by decreasing page load times. When a user requests a webpage using a browser, the CDN delivers the webpage's content to the browser over a fast and efficient network. A content delivery network isn’t web hosting; it only serves the content for the website or a web application contributing to high-performance. Some CDN providers specialize in video streaming or file downloads like software, documents, or videos and some, like us, can help you optimize website content at the same time.

CDNs are not "one size fits all." Factors like the number of requests, page size, amount of traffic, and need for security affect what type of CDN is needed. It's important to do research before choosing a CDN service provider to determine whether the provider's functionality meets your needs. If you're interested in learning more about how implementing a CDN improves website’s performance, check out our series of blog posts on How CDN makes your website faster.

Advantages of Using a CDN

A CDN has many edge servers in many locations around the world, which means that a CDN can deliver web content faster than the origin server simply because it is closer to the user. It not only ensures better performance and improves SEO. It helps with security by removing the burden of handling security from the origin server.

On top of that, CDN is easy to implement, as it can be integrated into most websites and applications with little or no changes.

Once the origin server becomes saturated with requests, the CDN servers will take on some of the load, so that one server isn't overloaded and the bandwidth stays stable.

Benefits of Image CDN

Image CDN is basically all about the same – a content delivery network that helps improve the performance of websites and apps by delivering them faster and making them lighter to meet user experience needs.

When users request content from an image-heavy website or app, the CDN delivers the content from its edge server, which is located closer to the user than the origin server.

In the integral part of good image CDN there is also image optimization, cropping, resizing and adaptive quality, basically allowing all sorts of image manipulations without any extra work or adding additional moving parts to your application.

This reduces latency, bandwidth costs and improves user experience and overall performance, making it useful especially for eCommerce, marketplaces and print businesses.

Website Latency

By using Content Delivery Network, you can decrease the latency involved when accessing your website. This will be done by storing copies of your content across the internet, so that when a user accesses it from a specific geographic location, they will be served with the copy nearest to them, rather than random content distribution.

User Experience

User Experience: A faster website will naturally lead to an improved user experience. Once your website takes longer than two seconds to load, research from a very popular search engine shows that your visitors will leave your site and go elsewhere. With a CDN work, you'll see reduced load times, reduced bounce rates, and an increase in how long people stay on your site.

Caching and Load Balancing

CDNs offer a variety of services to help with the scaling of content delivery networks. The most common scaling services offered are load balancing and dynamic caching. Load balancing involves multiple servers working together to handle loads that exceed the capacity of a single server. Load balancing allows a CDN to be flexible to handle traffic spikes without incurring downtime.

When used in conjunction with a global content delivery network, load balancing can help deliver more information to users faster than using a single server.

The dynamic cache is a service that allows CDNs to determine how long a piece of content should be cached based on the popularity of that content. Dynamic cache allows CDNs to serve only the most popular content, which will help reduce bandwidth requirements while serving content faster. Traffic management tools allow a CDN provider to control bandwidth usage and prioritize web traffic in real-time. Such cached content is widely used in e-commerce and marketplace websites.

Content Delivery Networks offer a variety of services

The most common services are application acceleration, security and monitoring, scalability and failover, traffic management, local storage, and DNS services. CDN providers bundle these services together as "packages".

Application acceleration is a service provided by CDN providers that acts as an intermediary to handle requests for websites and applications. This service helps to increase the performance of a website or application by minimizing latency. The second most popular service offered by CDN providers is security and monitoring.

Security and Monitoring

Security and monitoring packages are responsible for the protection of data being transmitted between the origin server and end-user. In addition to this, they also monitor the status of the CDN itself. These services help protect and monitor the network infrastructure and systems. They analyze the data patterns and trends to be able to detect possible threats before they occur, giving you eg. DDoS protection and securing your website/app. Mitigation options are available.

These packages may also include antivirus software, intrusion detection systems and vulnerability management applications detecting DDoS attacks, and many more.

Traffic management tools can be used to ensure that high-priority content is delivered in a timely manner. These tools also prevent competing content from overwhelming a website. Local Storage is a service that allows CDN providers to store copies of digital assets on local devices such as hard drives in data centers, connected directly to the network backbone for distribution.

Local storage is used when content must be stored offline for an extended period of time, making it ideal for content that is rarely updated such as video files, high-quality images, and big data sets. If local storage is used in conjunction with dynamic cache, the CDN will automatically remove old or irrelevant content from its cache when necessary, helping to keep costs low while improving performance.

Points of Presence

The more strategically located data centers, the merrier. Points of Presence (POPs) are individual geographical locations that are essential to the CDN network of servers. The number of POPs as well as their location affects the global connectivity and data transfer. JFYI - Uploadcare has 325,000+ nodes worldwide.