A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.
In the article above where we talked about the optimization of server response time, we mentioned that getting your server closer to where most of your users are accessing your site will improve the server response time, since they don’t need to travel across the world to get the requested resources.
However, when you have a global audience, it becomes practically impossible. That’s where CDN comes into play. CDN helps with loading speed by having data centers across the world caching copies of resources users requested and serve that copy to new users that are requesting the same resources. With that implementation, your website now can enjoy the benefit of:
- Improving website load times: By having a network of servers serving a copy of website to the user that are requesting the same resources
- Reducing bandwidth costs – Bandwidth consumption costs for website hosting is a primary expense for websites. Through caching and other optimizations, CDNs are able to reduce the amount of data an origin server must provide, thus reducing hosting costs for website owners.
- Increasing content availability and redundancy – Large amounts of traffic or hardware failures can interrupt normal website function. Thanks to their distributed nature, a CDN can handle more traffic and withstand hardware failure better than many origin servers.
- Improving website security – A CDN may improve security by providing DDoS mitigation, improvements to security certificates, and other optimizations.
By how do we go about configuring content delivery network? And what are some of the options we have available at hands?
In below articles we will go through how we can go about configuring CDN for your website.