What are the main CDN benefits?
A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of servers spread out over a region or worldwide that work together to speed up content delivery on the web. The servers in a CDN temporarily store (or cache) webpage content like images, HTML, JavaScript, and video. They send the cached content to users who load the webpage. Today, almost all websites and applications rely on a CDN to help serve content to their users.
Web applications use CDNs primarily because they offer four important benefits: better performance, increased reliability, cost savings, and resilience against cyber attacks.
Performance
Faster performance is the benefit most people consider when considering CDNs, and for a good reason. Websites that start using a CDN have seen 50% reductions in load times, or even more in some cases. CDNs speed up content delivery by:
- Decreasing the distance between where content is stored and where it needs to go
- Reducing file sizes to increase load speed
- Optimizing server infrastructure to respond to user requests more quickly
Learn more about CDN performance benefits.
Reliability
Sometimes, things go wrong on the Internet. Servers go down, networks become congested, and connections get interrupted. A CDN enables web applications to provide uninterrupted service to users even in the face of these problems.
CDNs balance the network traffic load, ensuring no one server gets overwhelmed. If a single server stops working, a CDN can initiate a “failover” process that allows a backup server to take over. Some CDNs, like the Cloudflare CDN, can route around network congestion, like GPS navigation software finding a way around heavy freeway traffic.
Since CDNs are composed of multiple servers in many different data centres, they can also offer a great deal of redundancy. If a server, a data centre, or an entire region of data centres goes down, CDNs can still deliver content from other servers in the network.
Learn more about CDN reliability and redundancy benefits.
Cost savings
CDNs cut down on expenditure for website operators by reducing trips to and from the origin server. Because CDNs cache much of the content on a website and serve that content from the cache, the origin server does not have to deliver the same content repeatedly. Instead, the CDN does this on the origin server’s behalf.
Web hosting providers typically charge websites for the data transferred to and from the web host: the more data that gets transferred, the greater the cost. People often refer to these expenses as “bandwidth costs,” even though “bandwidth” refers to network capacity.
But when a CDN serves most of a website’s content on the origin server’s behalf, far less data must be transferred. Fewer user requests go to the origin server because the CDN handles most of them. And less content goes out from the origin server for the same reason, lowering bandwidth costs.
Learn more about how CDNs reduce bandwidth costs.
Resilience against attack
CDNs are especially well-suited to defending websites from denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In these attacks, an attacker directs vast quantities of junk network traffic at a website to try to overwhelm and crash the website. With their many servers, CDNs are better able to absorb large amounts of traffic, even unnatural traffic spikes from a DDoS attack, than a single origin server. By doing so, they keep websites online even when under attack.
Learn more about how CDNs absorb DDoS attacks.
(Credit: Cloudflare)
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