What Is Content Delivery Network (CDN)? How CDN Works?

Content Delivery Network is a global cluster of caches which works as local caches for static files and objects. You are dealing with CDN everyday irrespective of whether you know what CDN is and how it works. We interact with CDN while reading article, shopping online, playing online, using social media etc.

There are high chances that all your online activities are done with the help of CDN only. There is a certain delay which you will experience while accessing any web page. This delay is mainly because of the server location of particular website. The main work of CDN is to make that delay as less as possible.

What is Content Delivery Network (CDN)?

The CDN is collection of distributed servers which serves web content to the users based on the geographic location of user, origin of content and location of server. The CDN is very popular way to improve user experience.

Let’s take an example here: Consider that you are searching something. You will go to Google and open the first two or three links of search result. Some website will load fast whereas some will load a bit slow. Which website you will prefer more? The answer is obvious; you will prefer the website which loads fast. Here the role of CDN comes into the picture. CDN will help webmaster to optimize their website for better user experience and better search result ranking.

How CDN Works?

The working of CDN is very simple to understand. As of now, we are very clear with the purpose of CDN. So let’s have a look at the working of CDN:

Webmaster needs to integrate CDN into the website to improve the load time of the website. CDN stores the static data of website into multiple geographical locations which are known as point of presence (PoP). The work of CDN is to store cached data and deliver it.

Now suppose user is requesting the particular resource from web page, instead of host, the CDN will give that resource to the user. While serving that resource, CDN will take care of geo location of user. So with the help of PoP, when the user from India accessed your website whose host is in United Status, the PoP of India will give the response and provide the necessary resources.

CDN will only serve the resource which is nearest to the user location. So CDN will reduce the response time of the website.

Suppose the nearest node is not having the requested resource, then the other node in that cluster will handle the request. If any nodes of the cluster are not able to serve the request then only the main server is used to serve the resource to the user.

There are various CDN providers which will provide their service to the webmaster. Webmaster will buy their service and then integrate CDN into the website. So when user request for a particular page, the new URL which is in the form of CDN will requested in the background and the node which is nearest to the user will serve the request.
CDN is for you if you want following Advantages from your website:

Decrease server load
Provides faster delivery of requested content
Provide 100% availability of your website
Handle more concurrent user on your website
Scale your website on large scale

So the working process of CDN(Content Delivery Network) is very easy and interesting. The main purpose of CDN is to get reach user experience with website. More and more webmasters are using CDN nowadays. If you are serious about your business and looking to scale your business, this is what you’ll need. What about you? Are you using CDN? Let me know via comments. 🙂