Why Need CDN?

What is CDN?

CDN is an abbreviation of content delivery network or content distribution network. Let us see what this is and why we need it.

Website Without CDN?

Let’s say you have a website hosted on a server. Let’s also say your site has many media files like images and videos. If a customer accesses your site with good bandwidth, then your webpage will load quickly. If the user’s bandwidth is slow, then videos cannot be played properly. They will start buffering for a long time. But what if your site has thousands of fans and visitors? If your webpage keeps buffering every time, at least some will lose their patience. And don’t forget about peak times. If your content does not load fully in the normal hours, your server will crash unable to handle peak time traffic. What about your fans? They will leave your site forever. Also, sometimes, there are completely unexpected increases in activity. The normal server will have a hard time coping with such issues.

Infrastructures of CDN

Let’s says your site is hosted in Tamil Nadu. If a user from Japan and Australia visit your website, then each images, graphics, script, videos and everything will go from India to Japan and again from India to Australia and so on. This is the method how web hosting works. This is improved now and has been introduced as a new concept, which is the Content Delivery Network.

In Content Delivery Network, servers are set up at major locations in every country. Each and every CDN server or nodes throughout the world have a copy of all your media files with them. So the next time the Australian user visits your site, your videos and script will go from the nearest server to him and not from India. So the CDN platform has many servers distributed all over the world and backups your entire rich page content for easy access.

How CDN Helps?

So the content delivery network decreases the loading and buffering time of your webpage. This makes yours page lighter to open even for users with average bandwidth. Also if your page loads significantly faster than others, you can attract more visitors. This is also ensures all of your content reaches them. For ex: you may say about an important product at the end of a video, but if the video does not load, nobody will have the patience to wait for it. But with the CDN, your content will be completely delivered to users. Also, the CDN setup is a good backup option. If you have a major destruction that destroys most of your servers, even then your site will be online. CDN networks also handle very large amounts of traffic easily. They will not crash by the peak rush or sudden spikes in activity. They can also withstand low amounts of traffic.