CDN stands for content delivery network and something like this can be found on every major website in the world. Of course, if you’ve never heard about CDN you probably didn’t know that your favorite websites use it wither.
It’s quite easy to miss since there’s no visual representation of CDN. But many want to know what a CDN service is, what it does and just how it manages to achieve its goals.
In this article we are going to explore these questions and see what CDN is all about. If you’re in charge of a website, you are probably going to want to start looking for cheap CDN providers after you’ve read this.
So what’s CDN?
To put it shortly, CDN is about reducing the latency that you experience when browsing a website. Through CDN, you are able to see a lot faster loading speeds for pages and seamless transitions between the pages. When you access a website, that website sends in a request to the server on which the information is being stored. If that server is way too far from your physical location, or the place form where the request was made, there will be latency. Latency is represented by the amount of time it takes for an action to complete since the moment when the command was issued. Surely you’ve experience at least one situation where you would click a button and it wouldn’t do what it was supposed to, until some time later. With CDN, that is taken care of and no longer a problem. Of course, there are cases where latency can mean a lot more than just a couple of seconds so for big websites that see huge traffic every day, CDN is very important. It allows these websites to maintain a steady flow and a great service quality for their users.
And how did you say it worked?
The only thing simpler than explaining what CDN is, is explaining what it actually does. It’s as simple as it is effective. Basically, when you use CDN, you entrust the service of your choice with the information that you want to upload to your website or online platform. So instead of just uploading content to your website, you are uploading it on a lot of cached servers from around the globe. This means that your information is going to be everywhere in the world at the same time. So when a request comes through from someone browsing the internet on their computer, the request will be redirected to the nearest server to their location. This puts your content very close to anyone in the world that is trying to visit your content. And of course, the main benefit here is that there is no latency and the loading speeds are great.
