Table of Contents
What is CDN?
It is a worldwide distributed network or servers that stores your data temporary in their data center to accelerate the site speed in different locations.
How it Works?
It will copy your website data in different data center. It allows very fast transfer of internet pages like HTML page, Image, Videos, JavaScript etc. The popularity of CDN is growing continuously. Before using CDN service, where multiple users visits the site through same server. But after Using CDN service visitors are connected through nearest data center.
Explanation:–
You can think of it like a tree up at the very top you have your server this is the route source of everything and anything that is form your website picture video content all of that stuff right here and let’s say we want to in to content delivery network how does this happen. Well it usually by DNS changes you will usually get a DNS record for your content delivery network they will usually give that to you and you replace it with all the images and picture links that happen to have within your website. Most likely you are using some sort of website that has automation so that will usually happen through that way now.
There are two types of content delivery network there push and pull. When you are push a server that means you are actually pushing all of the static contents onto the content network servers. As a example If I were to upload an image what would happen to the server. Well it would take that image and push it off to the content to the Content Delivery Network. CDN take the image and cache it out across its network.
A pull server works little bit differently somebody has to request the link to what are you looking for. Example when the very first person goes to that image the CDN is going to go to your root server pull that image out, download it to its server and then distributed across the network to be served locally. So, you implement pull server CDN you are going to have a little bit slowness with loading because it’s starting to cache all that content.
Which one performs better? It really depends on situation. We have all these content being served across the network how does it work. Very simple CDN have things called nodes. Nodes are the servers all over the world. They get these server as many places as possible to serve the content locally. When a person who may be in foregin country may be across the road whatever its going to look up when it goes to get the image it’s going to say here is the DNS of the image. CDN is gonna say okay i recognize you being from Let’s say Australia it’s gonna say great you are in Australia, I am going to find the closest node to Australia and load you the image from here. It helps to load your server being nice. It is very helpful for slow loading websites or web servers. It really reduces your sites loading time.
What are main benefits of using CDN service:-
- Free SSL :- After enabling CDN service you can install free SSL in your website. There is no need to pay any money to install SSL and also your site will be open with HTTPS.
- No downtime:– When more visitors are coming in your site, your site goes down as site is hosted on single CPU. If CDN is enabled then request was not directly send to the main server, it goes to the nearest data center. So, CPU memory will be used very less. There is no downtime for your server. Site runs very faster.
- Secure Website:- A CDN improve security by providing DDos protection. It also improve your security certificate to protect from brute force attack and bot traffic.
- User Experience:- It will help your site faster so user experience also be good. Fast loading helps to maintaining good bounce rate of your site and increases the amount of spending time of user in your site.
- Reducing Bandwidth cost:– Hosting is the primary expenses of the publishers. CDN’s caching and optimization reduces the uses of data of main server so it is very helpful for publishers. It reduces the hosting cost of the publishers.
- Increases content Availability:- A huge number of traffic interrupt the normal functioning of website. CDN enabled site is capable of handling more traffic at a time. And it helps to reduce any type of hardware error from main server.
Final words, These is the most simplest way I discussed how CDN works and its benefits in the above. Still, if you have any question regarding CDN you can freely ask me in the comments.