Businesses, big and small, are always on the lookout for ways to improve their websites’ performances. The internet has become the main way of doing business, and business websites play key parts in enabling it.
Every business that strives to succeed in the current “e-competition” needs to take advantage of whatever technology that is available to it. One such technology that can help boost their site’s performance is a content delivery network or CDN.
If you haven’t made use of it yet, you would be well advised to look into CDNs.
What is a CDN?
A CDN is an array of servers that are physically located in various geographical locations. When you subscribe to the service, your website’s content will be copied from the originals in your web hosting provider’s server(s) and placed in each of the CDN servers.
Who is it for?
Ideally, CDNs should be used by business websites that have a lot of traffic because, then, it will be well worth the investment. Another factor that would necessitate CDNs would be if the business’ target market is spread out across the world.
Finally, if a business’ website has lots of media files (images, audio and video files, etc.) they are resource-intensive and take longer times to download. CDNs spread the load and cut the time required to access them.
But, that doesn’t mean those with average traffic, a local target market and no media files should stay away from using CDNs. To understand why, we will need to look at the advantages all business websites will get from using them.
The Advantages
When your business’ website is served from CDN servers, you get the following advantages:
- Content from the nearest server: placing your website’s content on CDN servers means copies are taken from the originals on your hosting provider’s server(s) and replicated to the servers in various geographical locations. When visitors come to your website, your site’s content is delivered to them from the server that is nearest to them.
A point that should be considered here is that not all the content is automatically sent out to the CDN servers. As an example, let us say your website is hosted in Los Angeles, your first visitor is from Australia and one of the CDN servers is in New Zealand. Now, when the first visitor sends a request for your site, it is sent to the home server (in L.A.) because, initially, there aren’t any copies on the CDN server in New Zealand. The initial request is noted and the page’s cache is stored on the CDN server.
It is only when a second Australian visitor asks for the same page that they are directly guided to the CDN server.
- Faster Service: not having to go all the way to the source server means your visitors’ requests will be met much faster. Now, you might not appreciate the fact if you have just a couple of hundred of visitors every year. But, just imagine you were lucky enough to have thousands (or better yet, hundreds of thousands) of visitors a day and they all wanted to get to your website. This would put an immense amount of stress on your provider’s server(s) and might even “break the internet” if it proves to be more than they can handle.
But, if your visitors’ queries are split by geographical location, they will be led to the server nearest to them and delays will be substantially cut. In case you are worrying they won’t be seeing the latest version of your site, rest assured that there is a checking process that goes on before you see the site, where the content on the CDN servers are compared with the originals (and updated in case there is a variance) before they are served to the visitors.
- No downtime: having your website’s content spread on servers across the world means that should your hosting provider’s server(s) go down, your website will still be available from servers in the other locations. Admittedly, it might take a little longer to access them if users have to be directed to servers that are far away from them, but you can at least sleep peacefully knowing that they will be served.
- Improved SEO rankings: search engines rank websites based on various points including their load times and server uptimes. Now, as we have seen above, your website’s download time is cut down due to the shorter distance between visitors and servers, and you also have almost 100% uptime due to the fact that your content is spread out on servers located across the globe.
This means, search engines will look favorably upon your site and rank it higher.
And so, if you can afford to pay for CDNs you should, because you simply can’t go wrong with this choice.
