CDN | How Could It be Useful For Your Website?

CDN. It is a really useful tool for anyone who has a website, starting from the meaning of the acronym. Content Delivery Network, which translated would be Content Delivery Network.

CDN | How Could It be Useful For Your Website?

A CDN is a network of servers through which the contents of a site are distributed. The base site, called origin, is “cloned” on the cdn in order to be usable on a whole series of servers around the world. The ultimate goal is to greatly speed up site loading times, especially for images.

What are the benefits?

Let’s start withan improvement in loading times.Assuming a site with a server originating in Rome, a visitor from China will take much longer than a visitor from France to connect; through the CDN instead, both visitors from China and those from France or anywhere else in the world will be connected to the server closest to them. Thus significantly reducing loading times.

A CDNalso adds security to the site,as aprotectionsystemfrom DDoS attacks, (Distributed Denial of Service, in summary when multiple machines continuously send requests to the server with the aim of making it go Down.

They are very common and in most some cases pose a serious risk to the site, as their purpose is to make a server unreachable for a certain amount of time).

With a CDN, the attack would migrate itself from the infrastructure in order to protect the origin server and be able to isolate the machines that are performing the attack.

Search engines also take into account the important improvement in site loading times, making you gain rankings in indexing.

How to choose a CDN

Here are the most important factors to consider when choosing a CDN:

1. The distribution of servers in the world.A good CDN must necessarily be present almost all over the world, in a more or less homogeneous way.
2. Thespeed of the servers, the speed with which the network is able to use the contents.
3. UpTime index, the percentage of the time the network has been online. Time for maintenance, updates and technical problems of the network host must be considered.
4. Elasticity, in supporting the various peaks.
5. Assistanceand availability of the host in solving technical problems
6. Percentage of Content delivered, asopposed to the percentage of packets that the network fails to deliver, a bit like a success index of the network.

Some CDNs to try

There are a few services to be on the safe side with:

1. Cloudflare(Definitely the best free chance)
2. Keliweb CDN(An excellent service, also thanks to the widespread StackPath network, at a great price.)
3. Jetpack CDN plugin(From Automattic Inc. plugin for WordPress)
4. Amazon CloudFront(Service offered by Amazon AWS datacenters)
5. Google Cloud CDN(Service offered by Google Cloud datacenters)