Why You Should Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Written by: Hosting Coupons on July 12, 2014

When considering the infrastructure for your website, it’s important to understand your audience.

What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) allows you to have copies of your website stored on other servers around the world.

As an example, your web server may be located in New York, and you can see from your Analytics software that a large percentage of your site’s visitors are based in the UK.

Without a CDN, visitors would have to connect across the Atlantic to the server in New York, which is a fair distance which results in slower page load times and increased latency (which can have a major negative effect especially for multimedia such as videos.

With a CDN, visitors in the UK will be able to connect directly to the UK server of your CDN provider, which might be in London for example. To maintain up-to-date files, the New York and London servers will communicate with each other regularly to make sure the CDN has the latest copy of the files – but this will happen in the background, so this won’t affect your visitors.

Why you should use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Using a CDN can offer a range of benefits, especially if your site receives visitors from around the world.

Some of the main benefits you’ll receive from using a CDN include:

• Faster page load time for visitors around the world
• Reduced bandwidth on your main server

In some cases, providers will also offer some form of firewall. CloudFlare is one example of a provider that does, and it helps defend against any attacks you may receive – though understandably, it isn’t perfect.

How do I choose a CDN provider?

If you’ve decided you’d like to go down the route of using a CDN, you’ll find many different providers, each claiming that they offer the best service out there.

Questions you should be asking:

• What is the CDN’s network uptime? If they have a status page, you might be able to see historic data on uptime.
• How many servers do you have? The more, the better.
• Does the CDN integrate with popular CMSs such as WordPress? MaxCDN for example integrates with two major WordPress cache plugins and offers tutorials for many other platforms.
• How does their pricing compare to other providers? Pricing is usually on a per GB level based on bandwidth, charged monthly, though this can vary.

Popular CDN providers include:

• Akamai – This is the #1 CDN provider in the world, used by Facebook amongst others. Unfortunately, the price point of Akamai’s offering mean they are rather expensive for smaller site.
• CloudFlare – One of the most well known CDN’s, CloudFlare offers a free plan for smaller sites, and even has a WordPress plugin.
• MaxCDN – Widely regarded as the best out there (apart from Akamai), MaxCDN offers a global infrastructure and excellent support.
• Amazon Web Services’ CloudFront – Known for their Web Services division, Amazon offer a lesser-known ‘CloudFront’ service which is essentially a CDN.
• EdgeCast – Used by many large companies such as CBS, EMI, IMAX, Yahoo! And more, EdgeCast is similar to Akamai in that they are aimed at larger companies and corporations rather than smaller businesses.

 

To decide between them, you should look at key factors such as uptime, price, and most importantly, reviews from current or former customers.