To Use CDN or Not – That is the Big Question for Website Owners
If you are a website owner who wants to expand the reach of your website globally without sacrificing great web experience. The best solution is to use a content delivery network or a CDN solution.
A CDN solution is a type of third-party service that helps your website deliver your content in different parts of the world faster and with low latency.
Latency, for your information, is the enemy of website owners. This is the time it takes for a user to request access to a web page (aka when they click on a link or type the URL of the web page) to the time it takes for the access to be transmitted to the host server, and finally when the web page content and all its elements are delivered to the user’s device.
The problem is when you are targeting audience at the other side of the globe. The transmission of web request and the delivery of content is longer, thus, making the page load slower and affects the whole web experience.
This problem is resolved through a reliable CDN provider because they have a network of servers spread out around the globe.
Instead of having web requests travel all the way to the host server, the request is instead sent to the geographically nearest server. This server will then deliver a cached version of the web page requested.
This reduces latency and allows users to have fast web experience even if they are not within proximity of the server.
To Use CDN or Not – When to Use CDN?
There are several benefits to using a content delivery network solution. In fact, here are some of the advantages your website will experience when you sign up for one.
Faster web delivery
As said above, CDNs help deliver your content faster especially for web visitors that are on other countries outside the US and Canada. Aside from having servers in different parts of the world, however, CDN services also supports compression and optimizes your web content elements for a more streamlined delivery and less consumption of bandwidth.
Capacity to accommodate traffic
Without a CDN, all web requests will have to be accommodated by the host origin server itself. If the website becomes too popular, it will attract a lot of traffic at the same time. It could be too much for the host server and it could lead to slow delivery of content, or worse, website failure. With a CDN, however, traffic is spread out over different servers. As a result, not one server is overburdened with traffic.
Great for SEO
To attract a lot of traffic, you have to make your website searchable in Google. One of the best ways to get your content ranked higher than others is to have great content and to have that content delivered fast to visitors. Yes, loading speed is considered when ranking websites. All things equal, the web page with higher loading speed will get the higher rank.
To use CDN or Not – When Not to Use CDN
There are a few reasons why you should not use CDN to boost the delivery of your network but there are valid ones like:
High Cost
A lot of the top CDN providers are not really affordable for the regular website owner, which gives big companies an even bigger advantage over small ones. If getting a CDN gets you in the red, then it might not be worth it to subscribe to one.
Covered locations
If the CDN provider has no server in the country you are targeting, then there is little sense to employ CDN services especially of the web content files and data have to travel further than without a CDN.
Restrictions
There are organizations and countries itself that block the domains or IP addresses of different popular CDNs, then getting a CDN to target them will be useless because they will not be able to access your website in the first place.
BelugaCDN makes CDN possible for (almost) everyone
While there is little that can be done to address organizational and country restrictions, BelugaCDN can solve the other two reasons why you should not get a CDN.
First, BelugaCDN has servers not only in North America but also in Middle East, Africa, Europe, South America, and the rest of Asia, which gives your website global coverage.
Also, BelugaCDN’s plans and pricing is so affordable, you can start at just $20 per month. Making this top CDN provider very accessible to regular website owners.
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