What is CDN and What does it do?

What is CDN and What does it do?

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In this article, I intend to introduce you to the word of CDN, the abbreviation of the word content delivery network, so that by reading this article you can get a deep understanding of CDN and content delivery networks. But before starting to examine the above, we first need to look at where the definition of CDN started and what is the special definition for it? In response to this question, it should be said that, according to the definition of the International Telecommunication Union, a network of content delivery is referred to any network optimized for the delivery of digital content.

The purpose of this optimization is to use it to eventually lead to an increase in the speed of access to the necessary information. Now the magic to access high-speed data is that when a CDN network is built, servers in Different locations around the world are configured in different countries with a specified longitude. Ultimately by receiving data from the main server and storing it cached based on the geographic location of the visitor identified by the user’s ISP send data from the closest CDN to the user. This way the user gets to visit the website on a much faster speed. That’s why if you open a Google-friendly website using CDN, you’ll see it coming up very quickly in the shortest time possible.

Now that you’re familiar with a simple, short-sighted view of the CDN, let’s look at it in more detail.

What is CDN? What is it used for?

As mentioned above, we can use CDN to access the required data more quickly. The content delivery network, or CDN, provides servers that are distributed worldwide and provide the user with stored content, depending on the user’s geographic location, from the nearest server to the user. The service is very influential in speeding the delivery of content and bandwidth on high-traffic websites and global websites such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and more. CDNs have different types that can be privately accessed only for a country or a specific company, such as the Chinese CDN network in China or Google’s CDN, which is solely owned and operated by Google. The most famous of which is the CDN that CloudFlare offers.

Internet corporations use their servers to control the traffic of their websites and from several servers around the world to store and deliver their information and facilities around the world. Now, it does not make any difference to users around the world when using their services.

They all use the company’s nearest server as quickly as possible. It offers many other benefits, such as security, always availability, proper distribution of pressure on multiple servers, and more. This is where CDN technology is highly efficient, and it can give all small companies and webmasters private websites the power of large corporations.

The service works in such a way that it stores a copy on its own nodes or its own servers around the world, from the downloadable information of your website (such as the CSS file, javascript file, multimedia files, etc.) And after the user logs in to your website and needs this information, the same data stored on the server that shares many websites will be downloaded and delivered from the nearest server or node based on the geographic location of the visitor. So when the user logs into the website with their browser, the information is sent to that user from the nearest available server.

Whenever the CDN server is not available for any reason, there is no problem and the data will be loaded from the main server, and the only difference will be the speed, which will be much less dependent on server traffic than before. Because this information has already been cached on CDN servers and does not require a specific process to register, it will be downloaded more quickly to the visitor.

Using CDN can give you more power to your server and give you a lot of benefits for the website and business you use CDN, including:

  • Increasing the speed of loading and displaying web pages in the visitor system fast because of loading data from the closest CDN
  • Increasing website security (since most connections are indirect and protected)
  • Increase bandwidth and reduce core server traffic, for example, if your server delivers 10GB of bandwidth when you use a 10-node CDN, in fact, you’ve added 10 x 10 gigabytes of bandwidth.
  • Very low cost for use due to the use of multiple servers
  • Simple and easy installation
  • Increase website optimization in search engines such as Google
  • Great solution to prevent DDoS attacks on the website server
  • Increase visitor satisfaction from your website and business due to very fast website loading

By connecting a website to a CDN server, your data, such as multimedia files, is stored across the CDN network that is located around the world, in other words, when you publish a movie on your website, a copy Cached from this movie is sent to all the servers that are on this CDN and stored in them, and then the visitor, based on the geographical location that is located to the nearest CDN server, can be loaded faster.

On the other hand, if attacks occur on the website and people who send the attack the website server will fail at their attack because CDN will prevent this.

What is the behavior of a CDN network?

If we want to deal with behaviors that occur on a CDN network to bring the data to the final user that is our website’s visitor, we can explain the behavior of an CDN network as follows:

  • As mentioned above, the Content Distribution Network or the CDN covers all of the World Wide Web servers around the world. So when you use the CDN system for your website and activate it, your information is copied and stored on each of these servers that are distributed over the world globally. When there is a visitor to your website or blog, the content of the website that can contain images, videos, CSS files, javascript files and … are loaded up from the nearest server to the visitor. In this case, the visitor is not directly connected to your host or server, it is connected to the CDN. So this will improve the performance of your website, and it’s security.
  • All information that does not be updated regularly can be stored on a CDN network to provide the user with the most up-to-date server throughout the entire network. Of course, the information that does not update is that files containing images, JavaScript, css, etc. So with this, if we reduce the cost of bandwidth or your server and use it to prepare and activate a CDN network, it will be much better for you, because we can reduce the bandwidth consumption and enhance our security against DDoS attacks. After all, in the end, you are not really losing your bandwidth.
  • The speed of access to the website in the event that the CDN is not active on it, in the country where the server is located, is at its highest speed if the visitor is only close to the main server. So when our website server is in America and a visitor from a country like Australia wants to visit our website. The visitor will have lower speeds than we do, but when we turn on CDN on our website, this speed is faster.

Does using CDN have any disadvantages?

There is nothing wrong with using CDN for your website, and I highly recommend using it, because if you use CDN, you will not only get several important factors for SEO and site optimization, but also You can increase the security of your website and make it easy to work on the website and update it.

The only thing that exists in CDN and, of course, can not be considered as a fault is that it’s not free. Of course, there are free CDNs, but all the features that a CDN provides are not active on them, and you have to pay the cost of activating such features so that you can have the necessary access to them.

How many CDNs are there in the world?

It can be argued that there are several CDN networks in the world, and the number of CDN networks is increasing because they are used for public and private use. But among the most famous CDNs, such as MaxCDN, VPS.net, Amazon Cloudfront, CloudFlare, etc.

We hope that this long article could have helped you, and answered some of your questions to CDNs. In case of any questions coming up in your head, simply contact us or leave a comment down below.

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