Why the Best Addition to Your Hosting Is a CDN 

Why the Best Addition to Your Hosting Is a CDN 

 

You may have encountered this several times that when you want a particular web page to load, it takes more time than what any other page would do. Or even instances where you as a business that owns a website have heard from your visitors or customers that the time taken to load a page is too much and that they have abandoned the session. In such situations, what makes a web page load quickly is a CDN if it is introduced into the web hosting infrastructure.  

A CDN, better known as a Content Delivery Network, is a server or a computer that caches web content that comes from an origin server. It is a network of servers and their data centres that are spread out across the world and help users get information quickly. It does this by using data centres called Points of Presence (PoPs) in strategic places to move the information closer to where the users are. CDNs also use caching servers, which store and send files that have already been downloaded. This helps websites to open faster and uses less bandwidth.  

 

Why are CDNs so important?  

 

As we explained above, a CDN caches the content of the website and stores it so that whenever a request is sent for that page, it can deliver without having the audience to wait for long. A considerable amount of reduction in page loading time is what makes CDNs most important.  

If we were to break this down to explain it to you in detail, here is how you can understand the whole process bit-by-bit.  

The location of your server has a very significant impact on the page speed. If the location is far off from the hosting server, then it is guaranteed that the time taken for the page to load will be a lot more. This is because, a hosting server is an Internet-connected computer that stores, sends, and gets data from and to other computers. The server’s main job is to be the hub where information from your website and your users can be sent and received. When a client asks a server for data, it uses a unique protocol, or set of rules, to talk to the server. This can be done by asking for a webpage, uploading a file, or streaming a movie. The server takes the requests that come in, processes them, and gives back the right answer. 

When you visit a website, for example, your computer sends a request for data (webpages) to the server where the website is stored. The server then gives the data back to your computer so you can view it.  

The request and response data must move back and forth between the user’s device and the server each time a user makes a request, such as opening a webpage. The duration of this journey, which involves numerous stops at routers and switches scattered around the internet, is greatly influenced by the distance that the data must travel. 

 

What impact does distance have on how quickly a web page loads? 

 

Simply said, there is greater latency, and the website loads more slowly the longer it takes for data to travel from the user’s device to the server. 

This is the reason why, for instance, a person in London will typically experience quicker load speeds from a UK server than an Australian one. These milliseconds can add up, even though data travels far and quickly, especially if a page is loading a lot of distinct files at once. 

One of the reasons enterprises that use web hosting want to leverage CDN is because it puts their SEO on a positive and gives their audience a better experience. Along with this, there are several other benefits of a CDN with your web hosting. Here is a deep dive into each one of them:  

 

1. Getting web pages to load faster

By using a CDN server close to where website visitors are, among other optimisations, web pages load faster for visitors. When a page takes a long time to load, visitors are more likely to click or leave the site. This can also hurt the ranking of the page on search engines. So having a CDN can cut down on the number of people who leave a site quickly and make people stay on it longer. In other words, more people will stay on a site longer if it loads quickly.

2.Increasing the safety of websites

DDoS attacks can be stopped by using the same method that CDNs use to handle traffic spikes. These are attacks where bad people send so many requests that your application or origin services can’t handle them. When the computer goes down because of too much traffic, customers may not be able to use the website. A CDN is basically a DDoS protection and mitigation tool. The GSLB and edge servers spread the load evenly across the network’s full capacity. CDNs can also handle certificates and make new ones and renew old ones automatically.

3.Getting costs down for bandwidth

Bandwidth is used up every time an origin server replies to a request. Businesses must pay a lot of money for the energy they use. Through caching and other optimisations, CDNs can reduce the amount of data that a base server needs to send. This lowers the amount of money that website owners must pay for hosting.

4.Content access and growing redundancy

Large amounts of online traffic or broken hardware can stop a website from working normally and cause it to be down. Because they are spread out, CDNs can handle more web traffic and can better handle hardware failures than many origin sites. Also, if one or more of the CDN sites go offline for some reason, other servers can pick up the web traffic and keep the service going.

5.Increase customer trust

When people are happy, they come back. In the digital world of today, it’s hard enough to stand out from all the noise online. Businesses, especially smaller ones that don’t have as much money to spend on marketing as the “Big Guys,” need every advantage they can get to keep the people they bring in. So, you don’t want people to leave your website, video, or audience-building show because it’s taking too long to load. 

 

Conclusion 

 

The benefits of the CDN are not limited to what was said above. Your business and tech teams can get a lot more out of a modern CDN platform. It can be used to control how people from different parts of the world get access. You can let people into some areas, but you can keep them out of others. You can easily move application logic closer to your users and to the edge. You can change the headers and bodies of requests and responses, route requests to different origins based on request attributes, or give authentication jobs to the edge. 

When there is a lot of traffic, infrastructure is needed to store and process logs so that they can be used for further analysis. CDNs collect the logs and give you an easy way to look at the data that the users create. Here is hoping you have understood the article and now know why CDN is the best addition to your hosting.  

BigRock is a reliable domain, web security and web hosting provider that offers 99.9% uptime, 24/7 support, high scalability and performance. In case you have any doubts, queries or feedback for this article, please share them in the comments section below.