A CDN or a content delivery network provides alternate server nodes for downloading resources. These nodes then spread throughout the world and ensures geographical proximity to users thus ensuring faster download time with regard to content and response owing to reduction in latency. In most cases, a cloud CDN server is considered to be a befitting solution for most web interfaces seeking speed enhancements and better optimization results. However, before engaging one such paid mechanism it absolutely necessary to understand whether the website actually needs it or not. And in order to have a fair understanding of the same, it is important to understand how a CDN system actually works for improving the speed and optimization experiences of the website.

Understanding the Workings of CDN

When you have a cloud CDN server, what you actually have is a network of servers that are geographically dispersed. Each node on the CDN caches static content of a web interface, like CSS/JS files, images and other varied structural components. The maximum amount of page loading time of the end user is spend on retrieving all this content. This is why it perhaps makes sense to provide these kind of building blocks of sorts to as many nodes as is possible, and is distributed through the world.

Now, when a user requests access to your site, the node that is the closest in terms of geographical proximity will instantly deliver all the static content, ensuring that the data has only to travel the shortest distance. This enhances the website experience in terms of fast access. Therefore, it optimizes the performance of the website.

The Importance of CDN

The primary reason behind engaging a cloud CDN server is to optimize the performance of the website in terms of speed. And in today’s ever busy world where most of us are yearning for more time every day, speed certainly matters. Having a CDN ensures a consistent performance for all users. A web interface can be hosted in a particular geographic location; however, the users might be from an entirely different and distant geographic region. So, a website housed in Europe could have most of its users from North America. In such cases, the speed of the website may not be as fast for users as you perhaps want it to be.

When you have a global cloud CDN server, it will allow users from the North American point of origin to download all the static content from a source that lies much closer to it. There will be absolutely no need of spanning the Atlantic Ocean for retrieving data. The user will be able to able to connect to a close lying server for accessing the same data in a jiffy. This will reduce latency and will ensure faster uploads on your website.

Optimizing performance with a cloud CDN server also means preventing website crashes when the traffic surges. A CDN will help in distributing the bandwidth through a network of multiple servers instead of allowing a single server to handle traffic