Creating and running a website is highly demanding task. Whether the website is for a small business or a page of a huge international enterprise, there are numerous obligations involved.
You have to think about all the marketing strategies, quality content creation, how to increase the visitor flow and also making the whole website stable and fast.
In the beginning, everything runs smoothly, but if your traffic goes up, a number of problems might surface.
For example, CDN is one of the things that not everyone who plans to run a website is familiar with. However, this might be the best solution for optimizing your website, especially if you are going to have international visitors.
What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?
A content delivery network consists of numerous scattered servers around the globe. What does that have to do with your website, you might wonder?
Well, the thing is that your website is hosted on a single server located in one location. If your website is geared towards local residents, there is often no need for a CDN. However, if you are running a blog or a website that draws in an international audience, having a CDN network is a must.
Scattered CDN servers, also known as edge servers, help the website by caching the static content such as images and other static parts, which require a lot of data traffic when a user is visiting your website. This functionality can dramatically improve the performance of your website.
How Does The CDN Help Your Website?
CDN helps reduce the website’s loading time. This is a very important factor for every website on the web. For example, if you are running a website without the CDN and the servers are located in the United States, all of the United States residents are going to have no trouble loading your website quickly.
On the other hand, if someone from Europe wants to visit your website, there is a number of problems that might occur, not to mention possible visitors from Asia or Australia.
But, if the website hosted in the United States collaborates with a CDN provider, chances of visitors running into a problem are minimal, because of the way the CDN functions.
As already mentioned, CDN servers are scattered across the globe. The fact that they already contain static data from your website means that the user that is closer to the edge server will acquire the essential data in a shorter period of time.
General load time is very important for user satisfaction, as well for ranking higher in search engine results pages. The more problems you have with your website the lower the chances that people are going to find you using the most popular search engines.
Do You Need A CDN Provider?
The answer is fairly easy to deduce. If you are planning to run a website that is going to be only for local purposes, i.e. only within your country, chances are that your website does not need a CDN provider.
The servers are powerful enough to handle both the traffic and data transition. However, if you are planning to run a website that is going to appeal to a worldwide audience, you’ll need a CDN provider to boost your website’s performance.
How Much Does This Type Of Service Cost?
This is the tricky part. There are numerous CDN providers out there; some offer free solutions, whereas others are quite pricy.
Picking a provider that offers a free service is not recommended, because sooner or later your website is going to see a jump in traffic. Unfortunately, these are the times when free solutions tend to fail.
So, it is probably a better choice to create a budget dedicated for CDN expenses, which can be as low as $9 per month, but can be much higher depending on the website’s traffic.
This is not something you should try and save money on, because you might risk endangering the basic stability of your international website.
We hope that it is now clear to you what CDN is and how it can help your website. To put it in simple terms, it is one of those things under the hood that can help set you apart from the competition.
Having a stable international website is much better than staying local, simply because of the vast increase in potential customers. Plan well and take care of every nook and cranny of your website; it is the foundation of your future success.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
