What is a CDN? Or What is Content Delivery Network?

The Content Delivery Network or CDN is a set of servers that are installed in different places to allow access to content in a fairly wide geographical area.

This is why the CDN is defined as a service that is responsible for distributing static content (videos, documents, images, music, etc.) in a more efficient way… to servers that are closer in the geography of the visitor that is entering. to the web

The improvement in efficiency is achieved with a so-called load balancing in which the servers that are in charge of hosting the content are subject, as well as the links that are in charge of interconnecting the different elements of the network; because of being able to eliminate the obstacles in order to serve the data in relation to the geographical proximity of the user.

Put more simply, the CDN is in charge of replicating the content in different networks and countries to then direct user requests to the copies closest to their geographical network.

Thanks to the geographical distribution of the data, servers are prevented from being paralyzed due to excessive requests… which leads to minimizing delays because the path that leads to the content is the shortest possible.

How does a CDN work?

This “Digital Age” has been forced to optimize the loading time of web pages because the data is not sent in a linear or direct way like TV or radio. Rather, they are sent through different nodes (server where the data is hosted) that are spread all over the world.

When a user does a search on a certain web server, even though it seems that the page they want to visit responds. Who is behind everything is the CDN.

The CDN is like the installation of the web in a geographical cloud available to the closest users. The final objective of this Content Distribution Network is to optimize the user experience on the web, returning quality in the connection load.

When a significant number of users request to enter a certain website and there is no CDN that provides more remote access to their geographical location, it happens that the website takes too long to load and even the connection fails or indicates that it is collapsed. .

That is why the Content Distribution Network delivers the files from the server so that they can arrive more quickly and thus avoid long loading times, as well as reducing the number of high access rates.

An example of this would be that when a user in Japan needs to access a website in India, the Japanese Content Distribution Network gives them a copy (data that is stored in the cache) of the page and the load becomes much faster, without interruptions and without the browsers of other users who also want to access that website collapsing.

In other words, it is a decongestion that is supported by a copy of the web page on different servers and in different parts of the world so that users who require access to it do not have to wait for the information to move back and forth, to the server where it is hosted.

Benefits of using a content delivery network

The benefits of a content distribution network depend on certain characteristics of the website in question such as size, location (related to the main traffic source) and the amount of traffic it generates. All this because, if it is a local company it does not require great visibility in the world…

Bandwidth Reduction

There are different benefits when using these servers, one of which is the savings in bandwidth that allows a reduction in traffic, which leads to avoiding extra costs associated with web hosting; For this reason, by maintaining a certain amount of bandwidth, which although it is necessary to manage your traffic when your points of presence multiply, costs are kept low.

This process is accomplished when data is temporarily placed in different caches to move the information closer to the user.

Increase in speed

The faster a web page loads, the greater the chances that it can be navigated because users do not have much patience when waiting.

The most common problem is the latency that the pages can generate, slowing down the loading speed and causing the web to bounce. This state known as latency is the time required for the transmission of information from the source to a given user and vice versa.

This waiting time causes delays in reading and processing data. In the way this data is transmitted and how it propagates in relation to the speed of travel. Therefore it is better to have a CDN and thus avoid all this.

Security enhancement

Although CDNs create copies of different web pages to facilitate access, they also block scrapers, spammers, fake bots, etc… or we can say, protecting your website from attacks.

Without CDN, the web is quite vulnerable to these attacks that are created to bring down the service, overwhelming network connections. These attacks come from several places at the same time, which carries a high risk of generating a considerable slowdown in order to prevent users from accessing the web. CDNs protect websites by automatically absorbing the load and also fix the problem when the attack targets the files on it.

Improve your SEO strategy

The loading speed is a very relevant factor for Google when it comes to granting a position in the SERPs to any web page. As the CDN improves loading times, this will lead to an improvement for your SEO positioning strategy, in addition to providing users with a quick response on their mobile devices.