Content Delivery Networks
When our customers have bandwidth limitations or latency issues, we often encourage them to use a Content Delivery Network. A Content Delivery Network can offer a variety of benefits. What is a Content Delivery Network and what are the pros and cons of using one?
A Content Delivery Network is a cluster of web servers located in different parts of the world, that are used to deliver static content (like images, scripts, style sheets) quickly to it’s users. Depending on the provider and services needed, a CDN can be global and located in different parts of the world, or it could be localized and located in different parts of a country.
As with any technology, there are advantages and disadvantages to using a CDN.
Advantages
- Lowers bandwidth utilization. If most of the static content on the website is being served through a CDN, less of your network bandwidth is being used to serve up the static content.
- Improves latency issues. Since users will be assigned to pull static content from web servers closest to them, there will be fewer network hops for users, which will prevent latency issues.
Disadvantages
- Sharing of resources with other customers. CDN providers tend to share their web servers across all their clientele, therefore response times could be affected by traffic from other websites sharing the same CDN.
- Lack of direct control. If changes need to be made to the content hosted on a CDN, the changes have to be made through the CDN provider, which can be inconvenient to developers.
- Expense. Depending on the content and the provider, CDNs can become very expensive to use.
Content Delivery Networks can be used to alleviate bandwidth constraints as well as improve page load times, by having customers pull static content from web servers closest to them. For example, if a business started off in the USA, but had now expanded to the UK. If a CDN was used, UK customers would load static content from a CDN located in the United Kingdom, which would require fewer hops across the network, and in turn make the page load faster. A CDN can be used on a smaller scale as well. Let’s say that there is a business primarily located in the East Coast in the US, but has started to get load from West Coast customers. If the West Coast customers pulled static content from a web server located in the West Coast, page load times for the West Coast customers would improve.
As a business grows and traffic to the website increases, a Content Network Delivery network could be a necessity. The next blog post will focus on the proper procedure for implementing a CDN.
-Margaret
Engineer at Web Performance