What is a CDN?
A CDN is a Content Delivery Network - basically a network of servers that deliver content from websites to users based on the geographic location of the user.
When a user comes to your website, they are redirected to your website's host server [i.e. GoDaddy]. Your web host's server is located at some central location, i.e. Phoenix. So every user on your website is accessing this one server to view your website.
If you have a lot of users on your website, you can overload your server which leads to a slow loading site or even a server crash. Also, most websites are hosted on what is known as a “shared server”. A shared server is exactly what the name implies. In a shared server hosting plan, many websites are hosted on the same server.
This is where a CDN helps. When you use a CDN, your static content [like images] is cached and stored on servers all around the world. When a user visits your website, the CDN technology redirects them to the closest server. This limits the number of internet hops needed to transmit the static files to your user. This makes your webpages load faster.
Why Use a CDN with Your Website?
As we've said, a CDN is something you use on top of having a web hosting account because it helps speed things up.
Website today have a lot if images. Images are used to drive home your point. They make your website a lot more appealing and effective. For everyone that is serious about providing the best possible experience for all their users, and especially for anyone with heavy traffic and/or mission critical websites, a CDN should be a crucial part of their optimization strategy.
Some of the advantages of adding a CDN to your website include:
- Speed – Once we started using a CDN on our site, the site got faster.
- Crash Resistance – The CDN allows us to distribute the load to multiple servers instead of having 100% traffic go to our main server. That makes it less likely to crash.
- Improved User Experience – Since we started using a CDN, we have noticed a decline in bounce rate on our site. Furthermore, we have also seen increased in pageviews and numbers of pages viewed by each user. So clearly a fast site means improved user experience.
- Improvement in SEO – Google has clearly stated that faster sites tend to rank higher in Search Engines. We have noticed our site ranking higher once we did the optimization on our site.
What is the cost?
Most CDNs are third-party paid services and can range from expensive, high-end setups for enterprise websites, to more cost-effective small/medium website oriented solutions.
The cost of a CDN also depends on bandwidth, region reach, and/or security/SSL needs.
CDNs don’t have to be cost prohibitive, and can be accessible to website owners of various budgets.
How do you implement a CDN for your website?
It might sound like setting up a CDN for your site is a difficult process. And sometimes it is, depending on the size and complexity of your website. But for most websites, CDNs are easy to implement. Essentially, you need to tell the CDN which files (typically static resources) it needs to mirror. Then, you need to configure your site to send requests to those files to the CDN for handling.
For anybody using a popular CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Magento, etc), plugins exist to set your site up for to a CDN provider without much difficulty. Other implementations may involve modifying DNS records and changing the name servers of your domain.
We recently added a CDN to our website for Media Motion Online. We have chosen to use the Amazon Cloudfront CDN. I have to say, it was very easy. We used a couple of Wordpress plug-ins from a company called Delicious Brains. I have to say, their plugins are well designed, well documented, and their support is terrific.
The last time we tried to add a CDN was about 2 years ago. It was a disaster. We spent at least 2 full days messing with everything. In the end, we were not able to add the CDN.
This time, using the Delicious Brain plug-ins, we were us and running within an hour. No issues. No fuss.