With cut-throat competition and need of faster delivery of content in the modern day, business has immensely boosted the significance of CDN (Content Delivery Network). It is actually a network of globally dispersed web servers that serves end-users with faster and highly available content. A CDN works on a distributed principle wherein the content is cached in all servers throughout the network. When a user makes the request for any specific content, the CDN looks for the server closest to the user, which makes content available to the end-user. In the network without CDN, in contrast, all clients access the same centralized server causing bottleneck near the server.
To be more precise, a CDN is a tool that improves user experience by reducing page loading time, and it also provides users to utilize network resource more efficiently. The content providers, be it a media company or an e-commerce, in return, pay the CDN operator against the services it provides, and the CDN operator pays ISPs and network operators for hosting servers in their facilities.
Although any website or mobile app which is expecting multiple requests at a time can benefit from a CDN, it is useful specifically for high traffic, heavy and complex websites having visitors dispersed across a large geographical area. It offers an array of compelling benefits to businesses, such as – e-commerce, finance, government, technology and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), and so forth, but media and publishing companies are using it to publish their digital content at large.
With the ever growing reach of Internet through various electronic equipment, like the smartphone, laptop, and desktop, the number of online news readers are increasing exponentially. As the media websites need to deliver updated content to their audiences timely and frequently, a CDN enables them to update news and headlines in real time and delete data that is absolute or of no importance.
Despite the fact that there a number of web performance tools available that help publishers reducing page weight and enhance page load time, but they are not enough. Tools like JavaScript Minifier, CSS Minifier, and HTML Minifier are useful for minifying scripts and HTML. Other tools such as ImageOptim and RIOT are there which make the file size of images smaller. Along with doing these things, publishers always look for ways that could cut down the page loading time for better user experience. Adding CDN as an optimization greatly enhances performance.
Without having a content delivery network the website is compelled to deliver content from the centralized server only, irrespective of the geographical location from where the request is made. If the distance between the user and the server is long, the performance is decreased as the content travels a long way. In contract, in CDN, fulfills the purpose of faster delivery of content by storing it in geographically dispersed servers, and serving the user from the nearest server thus increasing the performance.
Additional benefits of using a CDN for digital publishers are:
- Enhanced performance of the website
- Faster page load for web and mobile user
- Highly scalable during traffic surge
- Reduced risk of traffic spikes at the point of origin
- Reduced infrastructure expenses due to traffic offloading
