The Magic of a Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network has a presence that can never be ignored. Whether you are aware of its presence or not, each and every one interacts with the network on a regular basis without realizing it of course. In fact, whenever you are reading a news article on the website of a leading daily, listening to some really cool music or even shopping online or watching some video feeds on a video streaming channel, or even going through your Facebook live feeds, there is one such network responsible for it. In fact, CDNs are considered to be the omnipresent backbone of the mighty World Wide Web.

Irrespective of what type of content you are consuming, chances are that you will be finding one such network behind every character or text. In fact every movie frame and every image pixel that you lay your eyes on has a delivery network behind it.


Why are these Delivery Networks so Widely Used?

In order to have a fair understanding of why these networks find their place in any computing device, it is important to understand the issues which they are destined to solve. Whenever we request loading a web page, there is always some time lapse before the page actually appears on the screen. This annoying delay which might sometimes run into minutes is known as latency. The purpose of any content delivery network is to minimize this latency period as much as possible.

The delay interval is impacted by several factors, some of which are specific to the webpage. However, one of the common causes that impacts the performance of each website include the physical distance between the hosting server of the website and the user. The mission of a content delivery network is to shorten this physical distance and improve the rendering performance and speed of the website.

How does a Content Delivery Network Work?

We know by now that a delivery network works by minizing the latency or the time required for the webpage to load. However, what is important to understand is that how it achieves the same. For minimizing the time lapse it minimizes the distance between the user and the server. And how does it achieve this? The delivery network stores a cached version of this content in several geographical locations which are called points of presence or PoPs. Each point of presence contains several coaching servers which are responsible for delivering content to visitor within the proximity range.

Practically speaking, a delivery network puts the content in various different spots all at once. This provides superior coverage to the users. For instance, when someone in India is trying to access a website that has been hosted in the US, it is achieved through a local US PoP. This occurs much faster that having the request of the visitor and your subsequent responses travel the width of the geographical expanse and then back.

So what does a Content Delivery Network Do for you?

Now that we know how a delivery network works, here is a list of the ways in which it can help in making your computing experience better:

1. It improves the speed at which your page gets loaded, improving your computing experiences overall.
2. It helps in handling high traffic loads. So, when you are handling an extremely busy website that has scores of visitors, a content delivery network can be of specific help and assistance.
3. It helps in keeping spammers, scrapers and other bad elements that might contaminate your network, at bay.
4. A delivery network will localize your complete coverage without adding up to the cost.
5. It will also help in reducing the consumption of bandwidth and also helps in reducing costs.
6. It also helps in load balancing between several servers.
7. It also secures your application.

It’s time to rely on one for sure! Make sure you check on experience and reputation before choosing one such network.