Content Delivery Network or content distribution network popularly known as CDN is an important part of high traffic websites deployment. Speed of the website is an importance measurement and directly affects visitor loyalty, page views, bounce rates and more importantly search engine rankings.
In this post we discuss more about CDN and how it helps you in speeding up your website. We have already discussed many factors which directly influence the website speed. Read those posts below.
- Top 10 tips : Speed Up Blog , Blog Speed Test and Load Time
- Top Tips to Speed Up website – Website and Blog Optimization
What is CDN and Why CDN is required ?
CDN as its name suggest is a content delivery network or content distribution network. CDN helps you to distribute your websites files into different high speed servers around the world.
As we discussed before browsers make limited number (IE8: 6 Connections Per Host for broadband scenarios instead of two ) of parallel connections to server. If you are hosting all the resources (like scripts, images etc) in the same server the browser has to make many different number of calls to the same server. This will definitely slow down your website or blog. The total time taken to load the site completely will be more.
So if you host the content or deploy the static contents across multiple servers the parallel download process across multiple servers will happen simultaneously and the website page load time will improve drastically. CDN network of servers will have copies of content, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network.
Most of all search engines like Google now consider website speed as a ranking factor. So it is important to have a faster website to avoid any penalize from search engines.
How CDN Speed UP website and blogs
As we discussed above when we distribute the content across servers of CDN the concurrent request from browsers will not hit a single server. The parallel download will result in huge improvement in website load time. When a user/client load a page o your site, the content will be delivered from a server which is much near to the user. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server. CDN achieves this by offloading traffic on a backbone and by redirecting this traffic to edge servers.
The CDN servers are high end servers and distribute your sites content on multiple servers across the CDN. This will result is faster website and as an indirect impact the average page view will increase and the bounce rate will decrease.
When you host your static or other content to CDN you will get the freedom of adding extra stuff like plug-ins to your hosting server.
Popular CDN Service providers
There are Commercial CDNs as well as Free CDNs services are available. The service providers own and operate a content delivery network.
Popular Commercial CDNs
- Akamai Technologies
- Amazon CloudFront
- MaxCDN
- Microsoft Windows Azure CDN
- CDNetworks (PantherExpress)
- CDNvideo
Popular Free CDNs
- Coral Content Distribution Network
- FreeCast
- PeerCast
- PPLive
- PPStream
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CDN benefit is overestimated. Maybe it works only for sites with millions requests a day. 99% of webmasters can just create a few subdomains within their hostings to have the same effect from better parallelization.
Hi Vic,
Thanks for the comment. You are right, CDN is quite useful for high traffic sites. But even for low traffic sites the content load speed can be increased using CDN.