What is CDN? How Does It Work?

Everyone likes fast loading websites. Not only your visitors but all search engines, including Google, also give green signal to fast loading websites. And for fast loading websites, you will need to do website optimization. Although the website has many methods of speed optimization, in this article, I will discuss website optimization using CDN (content delivery network).

What is CDN?

A content delivery network (CDN) is a server that delivers fast Internet content at once. A CDN lets you quickly transfer the resources needed to load HTML content, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, videos, etc. Currently, the popularity of CDN services is increasing, and now most web traffic is provided by CDNs, such as Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon. A properly configured CDN help to protect your website from some unauthorized attack, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Some of the biggest providers in the CDN space are companies like Akamai, AWS CloudFront, Cloudinary, Incapsula, MaxCDN, Cloudflare, and others. And the most notable among these are the CloudFlare CDN. Now we know about Cloudflare CDN.

What is Cloudflare CDN?

From the above paragraphs, you have surely understood, what CDN is and how it works. And if we talk about Cloudflare CDN, "Cloudflare" is a CDN service provider. These are the most popular service providers for CDN Provide in the world. There are many CDN servers in the world, which are enough to give your website too much-loading speed.

Already, Cloudflare is not just the CDN, but much more. They offer CDN, and web security, from various website development improvements. They have both free and paid type service. Although you can do a lot more than the free service, the paid service will provide you with some more advanced features. Cloudflare currently offers free SSL certificates for any site, if you have created a site on Google Blogger, you can secure SSL to your domain by using Cloudflare.

It does not matter, from which platform you created your site, you can use Cloudflare for any website. But if your site is made on WordPress, you can undoubtedly prepare your site for Cloudflare in a much quicker time.

How Does It Work?

To get a clear idea about how does CDN work, there should be a light discussion about web servers and the Internet. See, the sites you visit on the Internet are physically stored on some web server. Web servers have some special software installed like a computer. Now, how do you download any pages from that server using the Internet? - On the Internet, all servers and client computers are tied to the same connection formula.

Now suppose, you have a website yourself. Now you have not been able to host it on your computer. Then, of course, you have to hire a server from a web hosting company and host your site there. The server location of your website can be anywhere in the world, well let's say, your website's physical server location is in America. That is, when a visitor requests for your site in the browser, then your site page from America reaches the visitors' computer via Ethernet cable or fiber optic cable or satellite.

Although the speed of light (186,000 miles/second) is much higher, there is a speed limit. According to science, any signal or communication system can't travel faster than light. And if speed is limited, it means that the computer is far from as a server computer, it will take time to reach the page on the internet.

Now that your web server is located in AMERICA, your site will load quickly in the USA, but your site will be slow loading from Asia. Because to travel to your site pages up to Asia, you have to cross many oceans, and with many types of connections, your site can reach. Now your site may be in America, but if you create or target a site to Asia, then there will definitely be more Asian visitors. In this case, you must be hosting sites on Asian servers to provide fast page load. But suppose you have a good visitor for your site from America, good visitors come from Asia, and good visitors from Russia also, what will you do?

Here it is necessary to "content delivery network" or CDN's. When you connect your site to a CDN network, those networks collect the cached copy of your site and keep them stored on CDN servers in many places around the world. Now if an Asian visitor wants to visit your site, then he is shown pages from the CDN server located in Asia, the American visitor shows pages from the American server. In this way, the visitors of that location will be able to serve pages from that location, so the site loading becomes much faster.