What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

All of us use content delivery networks (CDNs) in one way or another without ever realizing it. These are content distribution systems that help deliver web content and web pages to users according to their geographical locations, as well as the content delivery server and the webpage details.

CDNs serve a crucial role in delivering website content in extremely fast speeds to maximize global reach, especially of content that have extremely high traffic numbers. Using a CDN has important applications for ensuring smooth and effective delivery of content to your customer base.

This post is a guide to all you need to know about CDNs and the ways in which it can offer you great use.

How CDN Works

CDN are being utilized by a variety of industries and for a number of purposes including e-commerce, mobile, healthcare, higher education, advertising, media and entertainment, and its secret lies partly in the way it works. CDNs help reduce the gap between the server of a website and its visitors. It does this by storing the content in various geographical locations in the form of points of presence in its cache and delivers it to various places simultaneously. This allows all the users to view the content from their respective locations without the problem of too much traffic.

For example, if someone in Australia wants to access your US-hosted website, it will be done through the local Australian CDN instead of the content being passed to all the way to US and back. This makes CDNs very effective for delivering content quickly and accurately to multiple users at once.

Benefits of Using CDN

Although CDNs are useful on a large scale, it also has several uses for your business. Firstly, CDN can offer you greater scalability that is not possible with even the most effective web hosting services. It may be that the web hosting service provided by Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. With a CDN, you can achieve higher global reach along with lower packet loss and network latency.

Secondly, CDNs serve as useful distributed data centers that are easily accessible to users from a certain locality. This makes connection and distribution of content a lot faster, especially if you wish to use your e-commerce website to sell products and services to customers from different countries.

Furthermore, CDNs come integrated with usage analytics and reporting tools that can help boost visibility and transparency of your content management operations. A CDN can inform you how customers perceived your videos and text content and use it to improve your marketing strategies.

Lastly, CDNs are extremely cost-effective. They can provide a substantial boost to performance by distributing high loads at incredibly low or no rates. With it, you can save a significant amount of bandwidth and minimize your current web hosting package costs.

In short, CDNs play a crucial role in distributing content to multiple users from different geographical locations quickly and efficiently. They are used by a number of organizations and also serve a number of advantages for business use.

We provide CDN and security by Cloudflare in all our plans. Cloudflare has one of the most reliable global networks and FastWebHost customers can easily use its benefits along with their hosting account.  All our plans include a free Cloudflare CDN and easy access to all other speed and security features provided by Cloudflare.  With FastWebHost you can manage your Cloudflare settings right in your hosting panel, thanks to our special integration of the service.