English
Español
CDN features and benefits
What is a CDN and How Can it Help Me?
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) have revolutionized the web hosting industry by increasing the performance and reliabilty of any website with very little extra investment in time or money. When you use a CDN, you have effectively chosen to host your website across the entire CDN network of servers rather than on your one, single web server.
What can I Host on a CDN Server?
The CDN network of servers is meant to host and serve your static data, which is frequently the most requested data that your hard working web server sends to your users. Static items within a website include images, videos, audio clips, CSS files and Javascripts. Serving this data at every new browser request take precious resources from your server that could be used in serving your content from a database.
Benefits of Using a CDNBy offloading the previously mentioned static items from your single server to a network of servers located across the globe, your web server is now freed up to serve the important content that drives people to your site(s). In doing so, your single server increases its web serving capacity and performance, which means you can get more out of that server, saving you and your business money. Another great side benefit of using a global CDN is the fact that content is now available to your browsing users closer to where they are actually located geographically. This is accomplished through the use of another global network called Anycast DNS. Anycast DNS is a method where your content is served from one or more of the CDN network servers closest to where your users make their request for your site. So if your website is hosted in our datacenter in Green Bay, WI but the bulk of your users are on the east coast, you can enable a CDN to serve those users the repetitive static images, CSS files and javascript from east coast locations rather than their browsers pulling this data right from your server here in Wisconsin. This is how businesses such as those located in Asia doing business in the US provide a high level of performance and reliability for their clients. |
Netsonic's Global CDN Network Points of Presence (POPs) |
CDN Networks Provide High-capacity Service
A single web server can only process so many requests and cannot scale infinitely. When the success of your site overloads a single server, you have to add another server and coordinate data synchronization between the two servers and implement load-balancing to service more requests. This increases the technical burden of running your business and consumes your precious time. A CDN network automatically distributes the load across all of its servers for you, all you do is tell it what data you want it to serve.
Distributed Infrastructure
As mentioned earlier in this article, a CDN network is a highly distributed service platform with servers located on networks and data centers large and small. This helps provide unparalleled performance for your users no matter where they are. This distributed infrastructure is also fault tolerant. Many servers in the CDN network can actually go down and yet your website would be unaffected. Traffic would simply be routed to the next nearest CDN server.
Analytics
A CDN network charges by the byte it serves for you and it is important that you have access to the same data that you were billed against. We provide a portal where you can track how much data is being served by the CDN network and view historical service trends.
A CDN Increases Performance While Saving Money
Using a CDN offloads your web server which increases its functional life, lowering your capital investment in new server equipment. It provides an automatic means to distribute your content worldwide, increasing the end user experience by serving data from the server nearest to your users. A CDN is afforable for anyone - usually the costs are around 10 cents per gigabyte!