Website owners place a great deal of emphasis on issues such as SEO measures or the technical parameters of the server. However, an increasingly important role is played by CDN, which has a positive impact on the loading speed of a website, which I am sure many of our customers will appreciate. How does this service work and what do you need to know about it? Are there more benefits than potential risks? Let's find out!
CDN: Content Delivery Network - what is it and what are its characteristics?
At the outset, it is necessary to explain what CDN stands for. The name comes from the English language and stands for Content Delivery Network. However, it is important to clarify that the word 'content', which is present in the English translation, does not only refer to the content that is visible on the website, for example articles, blog posts or data from the 'Contact Us' section. The CDN Service influences the website to a much greater extent.
The origins of this technology can be traced back to the 1990s, although the real boom in CDN Network began a little later, with the popularisation of the internet and the rise of mobile devices in the market. It is estimated that today, in 2022, around 75 per cent of sites use this standard.
It not only affects the user experience, but also helps developers to manage the portal effectively, who can, among other things, significantly reduce the load on the servers, which can translate into real savings for the company.
CDN - highlights
POPs, or so-called points of presence, play a key role. These are usually placed in key locations for a country or continent. Their overriding role is to minimise latency and maintain the highest packet throughput. This can be perfectly explained by the following example.
If an internet user from Poland wants to access a manga site hosted on a server in Japan, the time it takes to deliver a request to the server can be significant - it has to travel literally halfway around the world. Such transmitted packets may be lost along the way. The user may also be concerned about the security of hosting in Asia, about which he or she really knows nothing.
This is where points of presence come to the aid of users for the first time. Placed symmetrically, in the main server rooms on each continent, they significantly reduce the time required to deliver our data package. 
This does not mean that the resources collected in this way are classic mirrors. Rather, they are points where copies of data from the parent server are stored. In our example, the one located in Japan.
Which POP we are assigned to is also not a matter of chance. Parameters such as:
- ping delivery rate,
- server performance,
- data encryption.
This entire process makes up the mapping. Whether a user from Poland connects to a point of presence in, for example, Germany or Saudi Arabia, can be traced by analysing the DNS data. For the majority of internet users, however, this does not matter in the slightest, as they just want to access their favourite website about manga.
Such users will not even know that they have been redirected somewhere, because the address in their browser will still point to the original .jp domain.
However, it is possible to point to applications that will help the user become familiar with the entire structure of the POP network. Tools such as:
- NetProbe,
- LanTopoLog,
- SolarWinds Mapper.
However, it sometimes happens that a POP does not respond. Is content delivery interrupted in such a situation? Fortunately, no. A second server in terms of key parameters will be selected, which stores a copy of the content from the base site.
The archived data is usually distributed dynamically to all POPs, which in practice means that the user will not even know that his/her query has been forwarded.
This type of service can also be used not only to store the entire "page copy", but for selected elements of the page. There is nothing to prevent that, within the Content Delivery Network, a selected POP is only responsible for loading graphics or video files. This is a great solution that, under certain conditions, can also reduce their loading time - especially if the Internet user is connecting from the proverbial other side of the world.
Content Delivery Network - advantages
Undoubtedly, one of the greatest advantages for the user is that the entire process takes place in the background and is fully automated. You only have to wait a short while to quickly load a page from the other side of the world without having to worry whether the local hosting is online at the moment or whether, for example, there is a fault (in this case, the last processed data will be loaded).
Implementing this standard in a company can also translate into real savings. However, it is important to realise that not every business needs to use CDN. If our company operates locally and, for example, focuses only on clients from e.g. the Silesian voivodship or a given country, traditional hosting will do just fine - if its bandwidth is adequate to the incoming traffic.
In the case of global projects, a CDN can realistically reduce the loading time of a page, which to some extent can affect SEO efforts, as the component that is taken into account when evaluating a page is also the loading speed of the site - anyone can check this in PageSpeed from Google, for example.
This is not the only factor analysed by Mountain View, but it is definitely worth ensuring that the time required to load a portal is as short as possible. Optimised graphics, compliance with the Mobile First rule and limiting JS elements in the code will also help.
Is this an ideal solution? Not necessarily. In addition to the issues already mentioned in the text, it is also worth noting that a CDN may make it difficult to quickly implement changes (and then present them) to internet users. This is, of course, because the resources will be downloaded not from our server, but from the Content Delivery Network, where the old version of the site may still be stored.
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