What is Content Delivery Network?

As the name suggest, CDN is a process of delivering content over internet i.e. if an end user requests for an content, the server delivers it. But this does not sound fun. To make it interesting, let me start with the word “why”.

Why do we need CDN?
Let’s say you have a very popular website and you are getting request from all around the world. For example, India, US, UK etc. Let us consider your main server is situated in India. So the response to request comes from India will take less time as compared to request come from other countries like US, UK. And this is obvious because the request/response has to travel longer distance for US or UK than India.

And this is the problem. You do not want your users to wait for longer period of time, you want to give them smooth buttery user-friendly experience. And this is where you will need this beautiful technology called Content Delivery Network.

What is Content Delivery Network?
Content Delivery Network is a distributed group of servers which works together to reduce the content delivery time by reducing the physical distance between servers and users.

A Deep Understanding of CDN…
CDNs are nothing but cache servers which stores cache versions of your website content. For most CDNs, each request for content will cause the end user to be mapped to an optimally-located CDN server and the server will respond with the cached (pre-saved) version of the requested files (also known as ‘cache hit’). If it fails to locate the files, it will look for the content on the other servers in the CDN platform and send the response to the end user. However, when content is unavailable or stale (also known as ‘cache miss’), the CDN will act as a request proxy to the origin server and store the fetched content to serve future requests.

So If your website response is slow, then CDN might be an good option for you.

Thank you for investing your precious time.