If you’re a website owner with visitors from overseas, a content delivery network (CDN) is one of the best ways to ensure your site loads quickly for those who visit from further afield. In this post, we’ll explain what CDNs are and explore how they are poised to develop over the coming years.
Contents
CDNs explained
Just like light takes time to travel across the universe, data takes time to move across the internet. This means the further away a visitor is from your server, the longer it will take for your website to load on their browser. If your server is in the UK, for example, a UK visitor might find your website loads twice as quickly as someone visiting from the USA.
This delay can have several negative consequences. Firstly, visitors further afield might be put off by the slower loading times and abandon your website, potentially lowering your revenue and impacting your online reputation. At the same time, search engine bots coming from overseas servers will notice slower loading times than bots coming from nearer to your server. As search engines take website speed into account when ranking sites, this could have a negative effect on your site’s performance in search engine results, resulting in fewer visitors.
For more information, read: How Website Loading Times Impact User Experience and Hosting Choices
A CDN is a service designed to address the latency issues caused by data having to travel longer distances. Essentially, it is a network of servers located at different locations around the world that stores a cache of your static website data. When someone visits your website, the CDN sends your website data from the server nearest to where the user is located, reducing the distance data has to travel and thus cutting the time it takes to load your site.
The only data that needs to travel from your hosting server is dynamic data or any update that has taken place since the CDN last created a cache. To ensure this is done quickly, CDNs use intelligent routing, a process that uses algorithms to find the most effective path for delivering your dynamic content.
CDNs have other benefits besides speeding up loading times. They can improve reliability by acting as a backup server if your own server is offline, ensuring your site stays live. And by handling some of your website traffic, they reduce the burden on your hosting server, letting your site handle more traffic without seeing an impact on performance. CDNs can also be a way to protect against DDoS attacks. If your server is bombarded with requests to try and take it offline, the CDN can still deliver the content from its own servers. The CDN, meanwhile, will be able to detect and filter fake traffic, preventing itself from becoming a victim of a DDoS attack.
It’s not just their global spread of servers that helps CDNs to improve speed, they also use other techniques, such as compressing files to make them smaller and load balancing, where traffic is distributed across several servers to boost performance. Combined, all of these attributes play a positive role in ensuring speed, reliability and security wherever your visitors are located.
The future of CDNs
As new technologies enable websites to do more things, CDNs are evolving to provide the services tomorrow’s websites will need – and they are using a raft of advanced technologies to achieve this.
One technology set to make a huge difference to CDNs is edge computing. Today, CDNs store and deliver content across a distributed network of servers. While these are located around the globe to reduce the time it takes for data to travel, it may still need to travel long distances. With edge computing, the data is processed close to where it is generated, at the edge of the network instead of in the CDN’s data centre. This further reduces the distance, greatly reducing latency and speeding up loading times. To work, edge computing can utilise various devices to process the data, including specialised edge servers, smart routers, IoT devices and even smartphones.
Find out more, read: How Edge Computing Boosts Web Hosting Performance
AI and machine learning are set to play a huge role right across web hosting in the not-too-distant future and CDNs are no exception. A key role for AI will be to optimise how traffic is routed. For instance, it will be able to monitor traffic and predict when certain routes will become congested and then automatically redirect visitors to less busy and faster servers. Machine learning, meanwhile, will offer more effective ways to identify threats on the network and block them, ensuring the service remains secure.
While the vast majority of today’s websites are principally composed of written text and images, in the future we are likely to see much more use of 4K videos, gamification, chatbots, augmented reality and virtual reality. As these high-bandwidth elements become vital parts of a website’s content, owners will want to ensure that they load quickly and run smoothly wherever they are accessed. As these forms of content can put extremely high demands on individual servers, a CDN offers an effective way to spread the load across multiple servers while ensuring optimal performance. Similarly, a CDN can also ensure reliable data transfers for businesses that operate IOT devices.
The latest innovation in the CDN environment is the decentralised CDN or dCDN. Instead of using servers to distribute content, a dCDN uses blockchain, where content is spread across different nodes (peer-to-peer devices and computers.) This form of distribution can further reduce a CDN’s latency and speed up loading times for websites as different elements of a site can be cached across a multitude of devices all over the world. Moreover, as blockchain is used to verify transactions and data transfers, as well as improve transparency, a dCDN could offer greater security for the storage of user data and the handling of online transactions.
Looking for speed? Read: Why Your Website Needs NVMe SSD-powered VPS Hosting
With millions of websites already making use of CDNs, CDN companies with data centres across the globe are undoubtedly significant energy users. However, like other data centre providers, the industry is looking to become more sustainable. Operators are already making use of renewable energy and offsetting to reduce their carbon footprints. As technologies evolve, they will also make use of more efficient servers, cooling systems and advanced energy management tools that help cut their emissions even more.
Conclusion
For website owners, especially those with international visitors, there are significant advantages to using a content delivery network. The primary benefit is that they help websites load faster, preventing abandonment, improving the user experience and increasing the chances of making a sale. Additionally, they ensure reliability and make websites more secure. As CDNs develop, they will be able to deliver content even faster, regardless of how much data is involved and with increased security.
Looking for a managed web hosting solution that helps boost loading times and comes with rock-solid security and reliability built in? Discover the benefits of our VPS Hosting plans.
