You could just create a website and fire it up, and once it was online you could just hope for the best. But obviously that’s not going to be enough for most people because for a website to really catch traction, it needs some enhancements that will transform it into a well oiled machine. There are a lot of things you can do to make your website better and even if you already think that your website is doing great the way it is right now, you’d be surprised to know that there are still things you can improve it with. Today we’re talking about CDN providers and how using CDN is critical for the well functioning of your website. We’re going to take a look at what CDN actually is, what it tries to achieve, how it does it and also what the benefits of using CDN are, of course. So let’s get right into it and see just what makes CDN so necessary for a website especially if they are dealing with huge traffic on a daily basis.
What is CDN
Let’s start off by explaining what CDN is. In order to understand why it’s benefic for your website you need to first know what it does. CDN stands for content delivery network and has the role of deploying data packets to your website visitors. Even if that sounds a little complicated it is anything but that. Let’s look a bit closer so you can see what we mean. Through CDN, websites are able to provide the same quality to all visitors regardless of where they’re trying to check out the website from. For example, if you’re trying to visit a website from another country, it means that their website server is pretty far away. If they don’t have a CDN service in place, you will know. How? Simple, through the fact that you will experience severe latency which will cripple or completely ruin your experience, depending on how far away from the mother server you are. CDN stops that from happening and if that website would have CDN in place, you would have the same experience as someone that lives right next to the server room.
How does CDN work
The way in which CDN is able to perform this task is by copying your website data to multiple servers. So while your main server would represent a single copy, the CDN servers would represent a lot of duplicates. Depending on the type of CDN that you use, the data from your website can be transferred differently and there are multiple options involved regarding how you can set up the servers to pick up your information. Nevertheless, a CDN service provider has these servers spread out throughout the world. Depending on the kind of plan you set up, some, most or all of them will contain the information from your website. When someone tries to access your website from another country for example, they wouldn’t download the information from your main server, which is far away from them. Instead, they would pick up the information from the CDN server that is the closest to them. It’s just that simple and the only thing that it is more than it is simple, is effective.
What are the benefits of having CDN?
There are a few benefits that you can look forward to when it comes to having a CDN service implemented for your website. Let’s take a quick look at all of them just we’re on the same page.
- You will be able to offer your visitors the best experience possible while surfing your website
- There will be no latency between connections happening across a very large distance and people from the entire world will be able to experience your website as it was meant to be experienced
- The loading speeds for the website will drastically improve and will make your visitors appreciate the high quality service you put at their disposal
- The stability of your website will see a major boost and the platform will be overall more safe and less likely to crash
- The CDN service you choose can be configured so that it suites the specific type of website you are running, meaning small, medium or large traffic
- It gives you ranged exposure for your website and content to other countries and cultures
- It lets you expand your market into other territories previously unmanageable due to the previously mentioned latency problem
Those were about it when it comes to the benefits that you can expect from using CDN. Loading speeds are very important because in this day and age nothing stands still. If your website breaks that unwritten rule, you can expect it not to be that popular as if it would load almost instantly.
Read: Importance of Using CDN to Speed Up Website
As for the stability of you website, there are certain risks involved especially if you are looking at a very big following. The more people that visit your website at the same time, the more likely it is for your website to crash altogether. This can be very inconvenient and ultimately it can make you lose a lot. Through CDN you don’t have to worry about that because the content is spread across multiple servers and it takes a huge load off of the main server which doesn’t have to deal with so much pressure every time you upload something new to your website.
If you’re just a local website and are trying to expand your horizon, CDN could definitely help you out. Imagining that your budget is pretty limited at the moment, it would be unwise to spend all your hard earned profits into creating and maintaining servers all across the world. The initial cost of getting everything going won’t be anything compared to the financial stretch you will be facing in the long run. But why go through all that when you can just get CDN. It’s a server service that assures you that all servers will be taken care of and that you don’t have to do any maintenance, and it gets your content across to whatever countries you want to surprise with your website.
As briefly mentioned before, there are multiple types of CDN that you could look into. There are two main categories when it comes to CDN. You can get Pull CDN or Push CDN. Both operate differently although towards the same resolve. It’s just a matter of which is better for your specific type of website. Let’s take a closer look at both these CDN types so that you might decide which would help your endeavors the most.
Push CDN
Push CDN
This one has more of a “manual” vibe to it. That’s probably because you have the freedom to do everything by yourself. You get to choose the different parameters for what the server will do in regards to your website, and you can decide how often content will be refreshed. If you have a smaller website or a medium one without a large traffic pool, this might be the one for you because it allows you to just upload the contents once and not refresh it. It’s also great if you don’t post a lot of new content often and you don’t need to invest all those extra resources into refreshing and updating the website.
Pull CDN
This is the solution for larger websites that see huge traffic numbers every day. In this particular case of CDN service, the CDN servers will automatically pull information from your main server to the CDN servers whenever it is required. As soon as a request comes through from someone browsing the web, the server will pull the requested data and download it to that user’s browser. This type of CDN will automatically refresh bases on a preset time period and can be a lot more resource costly since it’s always working. But if you have a lot of visitors and you also post a lot each week, it will be great to always have the newest content refreshed and delivered as soon as it is needed. You end up saving a lot in the long run in this case.
Now that we’ve looked at what CDN is, how it works and even what the different types of CDN are, it’s pretty safe to assume that you have a more educated opinion on whether or not your website will benefit from the implementation of such a service and if so, how much. There are a lot of variables that need to be taken into consideration so that the best can be made out of using CDN for your website. Overall, it’s pretty obvious that CDN is a very useful service that enhances the quality of your website. With so much emphasis put on websites today, it’s very important to do everything you can to up the experience for anyone visiting the site. Performance and stability are key aspects of this and CDN can improve your website a lot in both areas.
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