Explore What is CDN how a CDN works under the hood to deliver content faster, more efficiently, and securely to websites and Internet services. So, let’s start.
Table of Contents
What is a Content delivery network (CDN)?
Just go through this video from IBM explaining CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a distributed group of servers (geographically) that work together to provide rapid delivery of Internet content to users. learn about Geo-targeting
A CDN allows the quick transfer of assets needed to load Internet content, including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. The popularity of CDN services continues to grow, and today most web traffic is served through CDNs, including traffic from major sites such as Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.
A properly configured CDN can help to protect your website from some very common malicious attacks, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks.
Network Delivery (CDNs) are the main Internet backbone responsible for content delivery. Whether we know it or not, each of us communicates with CDNs on a daily basis; When you browse articles on news sites, do online shopping, watch Netflix videos, or write a review on social media networks.
No matter what you do, or what kind of content you consume, the chances of a CDN popping up behind every text, every pixel, and every movie frame you give to your PC and mobile browser.
How do CDN works?
Just go through this amazing video explaining the working of the Content Delivery System (CDN).
To reduce the distance between the visitor and your website server, a CDN stores a cached version of its content in multiple geographic locations (aka, points, or POP). Each POP has several caching servers, which are responsible for the delivery of content near the visitor.
In short, CDN keeps your content in several places at once while providing better coverage to your customers. For example, when someone in Munich accesses your US-hosted website, it is done through the local German POP. It is much faster than visitor requests and travels with your responses, Atlantic and full width. learn about CMS from here.
How a CDN works briefly. In fact, the rabbit hole goes deeper than we thought we would need a complete guide to explain the internal functioning of content delivery networks.
Who uses CDNs?
Almost everyone. Today, more than half of the traffic is already provided by CDNs. This number is growing rapidly with each passing year. The fact is that if any part of your business is online, there are some reasons not to use CDN, especially when many people offer their services for free.
Even as a free service, CDNs are not for everyone. In particular, having a CDN can be of some benefit if you run a strictly localized website with many of your customers in the same area as your hosting. In this scenario, using a CDN can degrade your website performance by introducing another unwanted connection point between your visitors and already nearby servers.
Still, most websites work on a scale that makes CDN usage a popular choice in the following areas:
- Government
- Gaming industry
- Advertising
- Mobile industry
- Health care
- E-commerce
What are the benefits of using a CDN?
Although the benefits of using a CDN vary depending on the size and needs of Internet assets, the basic benefits for most users can be broken down into 4 distinct parts:
Improve website load times – By delivering content closer to website visitors using nearby CDN servers (among other optimizations). visitors experience faster page loading times. Since visitors avoid clicking & get away from a slow-loading site, a CDN reduces bounce rates and increases the amount of time people spend on the site. In other words, a faster website means more visitors and longer hours, and greater satisfaction.
Reducing Bandwidth Costs – The cost of bandwidth usage for website hosting is the primary cost for websites. Through caching and other optimizations, CDNs can reduce the amount of data provided by source servers, thus reducing hosting costs for website owners.
Increased Content Availability and Redundancy – Large amounts of traffic or hardware failures can interfere with normal website function. Thanks to the distributed nature, CDNs can handle more traffic and withstand hardware failure than multi-source servers.
Provide security to the website – A CDN improves security by providing strong DDOS mitigation, security certification, and other secure optimizations.
Basic Components of CDN
POP (Point of Presence)
CDN POP (Point of Presence) is a strategic data center that is responsible for communicating with customers in a geographical environment. Their main function is to reduce travel time by bringing the content closer to the website visitors. Each CDN POP typically has multiple caching servers.
HDD/SSD + RAM
Inside the CDN caching server system, cached files are stored on the solid-state hard disks. (SSD and HDD) or random-access memory (RAM) where commonly used files are hosted on fast media. The fastest of the three, RAM is usually used to store the most accessible items.
Cache Servers
Cached servers are responsible for storing and distributing cached files. Their main function is to speed up website load times and reduce bandwidth usage. Each CDN caching server usually has multiple storage drives and a large amount of RAM.
Final thoughts
For a CDN to work, it must be the default inbound gateway for incoming traffic. To do this, you need to modify your root domain DNS configuration (e.g., domain.com) and your subdomains (e.g., www.domain.com, img.domain.com).
For your root domain, you can convert its A record to one of the CDNs’ IP domains. For each subdomain, modify its CNAME record to indicate the CDN-provided subdomain address (eg, ns1.cdn.com). In both cases, DNS routes all visitors to your CDN instead of directing them to your source server.
If any of this sounds confusing, don’t worry. Today’s CDN vendors provide step-by-step instructions to get you through the activation step. In addition, they provide support through their support team. The whole process takes some copying and pasting and usually takes about five minutes.
4 Comments
Ali Nawaz
Amazing information… keep updating… thank you.
inamdurrani60
Thanks Ali Nawaz
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