What is CDN and why it matters
“…this affects your content quality – imagine you are streaming, but every 2 second, the video stopped to buffer from Los Angeles as it requires to pull the content from such far away location.”
What is CDN?
CDN in short, stands for content delivery networks. CDN is now widely used as it is designed to solve latency issues – one of the most annoying issue occurs when you are trying to consume contents from other countries in the world. This is because, the further you are, the higher the latency you will suffer from – for example, Los Angeles, US to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia has an average latency of 250ms. And this affects your content quality – imagine you are streaming, but every 2 second, the video stopped to buffer from Los Angeles as it requires to pull the content from such far away location.
This is CDN’s mission – to virtually shorten the physical distance and the goal being to improve site rendering speed and performance.
How does this magic work?
CDN works by provider deploying different “POP” in different country, and these POP serves as a cache server for your contents. The same scenario, content originated from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur. But this time, the provider installed a POP in Kuala Lumpur itself. All your contents, will be pulled from Los Angeles to this POP, and you stream directly from the POP server. The latency in between your location, to the POP – will be around 10ms, in which your contents stream without any buffer.
Suitable for?
Pretty much everyone! As long as you need part of your business online, then you should consider CDN services. The only reason for you not to consider to opt for CDN, is your business only serves locally even it is online (For example, your website is only to serve customers solely from Malaysia). Here is a general list of suitable usages:
- Advertising
- Media and entertainment
- Online gaming
- E-commerce
- Mobile
- Healthcare
- Higher education
- Government
Not only that, CDN providers also usually include ReverseProxy (to hide your originate content IP address), Web Application Firewall and site speed enhancement (such as load balancing) to you! In conclusion, what CDN can do for you:
- Improve page load speed
- Handle high traffic loads
- Block spammers, scrapers and other bad bots
- Localize coverage without the cost
- Reduce bandwidth consumption
- Load balance between multiple servers
- Protect your website from DDoS attacks
- Secure your application
- And more
For more information about how TheGigabit can helps speed your contents, please contact [email protected]