What is CDN? Print

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Keeping your online store open for all hours is standard operating procedure. Shoppers demand it.

They also demand a compelling user experience, fast-loading pages, intuitive navigation, and a worry-free and secure checkout. If they experience a glitch in any of these, shoppers will likely abandon your site.

Research suggests that visitors will wait just five seconds for a web page to show on their screen. Once visitors leave a site, 68 percent will never return.

Content delivery networks (CDN) are the transparent backbone of the Internet in charge of content delivery. Whether we know it or not, every one of us interacts with CDNs on a daily basis; when reading articles on news sites, shopping online, watching YouTube videos or perusing social media feeds.

No matter what you do, or what type of content you consume, chances are that you'll find CDNs behind every character of text, every image pixel and every movie frame that gets delivered to your PC and mobile browser.

To understand why CDNs are so widely used, you first need to recognize the issue they're designed to solve. Known as latency, it's the annoying delay that occurs from the moment you request to load a web page to the moment its content actually appears onscreen.

That delay interval is affected by a number of factors, many being specific to a given web page. In all cases however, the delay duration is impacted by the physical distance between you and that website's hosting server. A CDN's mission is to virtually shorten that physical distance, the goal being to improve site rendering speed and performance.

How a CDN Works

To minimize the distance between the visitors and your website's server, a CDN stores a cached version of its content in multiple geographical locations (a.k.a., points of presence, or PoPs). Each PoP contains a number of caching servers responsible for content delivery to visitors within its proximity.

In essence, CDN puts your content in many places at once, providing superior coverage to your users. For example, when someone in London accesses your US-hosted website, it is done through a local UK PoP. This is much quicker than having the visitor's requests, and your responses, travel the full width of the Atlantic and back.

This is how a CDN works in a nutshell. Of course, as we thought we needed an entire guide to explain the inner workings of content delivery networks, the rabbit hole goes deeper.

A CDN improves a site’s speed and performance by caching content on servers that are closer to visitors. A visitor in the U.K., for example, would experience faster load times if a site’s web server is located in the U.K., versus, say, in the U.S.


Content delivery networks are the engines of the Internet, moving large amounts of data and images. The distributed nature of CDNs helps to move the content quicker and more efficiently, making a CDN essential for any high-traffic site that hopes to attract global consumers. Ecommerce sites with many products, images, and supporting collateral can improve site speed with a reliable CDN.

But latency issues aren’t the only things a CDN can solve. CDNs also offer website security. Deployed at the edge of your network, a CDN acts as a virtual high-security barrier that prevents attacks on your website and web applications. This makes a CDN ideal for blocking distributed denial of service attacks — before they reach your site.


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