How a CDN Provider can Make your Website Faster?
Today, CDN providers offer many indirect advantages such as better search result performance, improved security and less invulnerability against attacks including DNS attacks. But one of the most prominent advantages that they provide is they speed up your website. And before we go into particulars, let’s make sure you know what CDN is: A Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider is a network of geographically distributed web servers. So, a CDN provider takes advantage of geographical proximity through the servers located on various different geographical locations to improve the performance indicators such as page load time and latency.
Now let’s find out how a CDN provider can speed up your website:
CDN Providers Offer Geographical Advantage
In the simplest sense, when a user browses a website, the user’s computer establishes a connection with a remote machine which acts as a server and requests certain data from it. In this case, this main machine is the origin server and it has to process all the incoming requests alone. But there are many drawbacks in such a scenario. First of all the processing power of a single server is very limited compared to multiple servers. The second part is the geographical distance.
Although technology lets us send signals near light speed even the light takes some time to travel through thousands of kilometres of cable. Since in the world of computers and internet, microseconds count when it comes to performance geographic location becomes a significant factor in page speed and transmission quality. Page speed is considered an important factor in user experience too, it also becomes a crippling factor in overall performance.
The solution? Distributing the workload of the main server to many servers throughout various locations. These servers can duplicate the content or data in the main server and traffic can be distributed according to spare bandwidth, client and server location. If the server is closer to the client, the data or the content will be delivered faster, therefore, the page will simply load quickly. The combined processing power of multiple machines will also process HTTP requests faster and prevent the origin server being overwhelmed.
CDN Reduces Image Sizes to Improve Your Site
Today most CDN providers don’t only focus on improving your site through a network of dedicated servers. They focus on improving performance by every means possible. Reducing image sizes is one of those means.
There are many ways to reduce image sizes on a website and multiple compression algorithms. CDN providers obtain and implement the newest technologies as they emerge. They also continuously optimize the images in the websites that they maintain usually without the need for the client to take any action. Result: The website loads faster.
CDN Providers Offer the Latest Encryption Algorithms
Encryption is mostly a topic of security, not speed or performance. But some cases are exceptional. Such case is the update to TLS from SSL. TLS algorithm is considered a bit of a revolution over SSL and it not only increases the security of the connection established between the clients and the servers but it also increases the speed by removing some procedures that used to stall the handshake process or the whole connection previously.
CDN Providers Provide Higher Speed Through Better Data Compression
Data compression methods work slightly similar to image compression algorithms. They compress the whole data transmission to implement more efficient use of bandwidth and achieve lower latencies and higher page load speeds.
There are multiple aspects to determine whether a compression method is better than the other. One of those aspects is the efficiency of the compression itself. This mainly depends on how much compression is achieved, how much time it takes and how much processing power it requires.
Today, some CDN providers take advantage of multiple compression methods such as BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-Trip Propagation Time) and BROTLI to achieve even further improved results.
CDNs Optimize Your Traffic to Maximize Server Utilization
A wide CDN network not only provides the advantage of geographical proximity. Having a network of servers at your disposal increases the processing power and bandwidth efficiency exponentially if the traffic can be optimized accurately. Some CDN servers take advantage of machine learning to reveal the patterns in the traffic and bandwidth usage of a website to implement measures to better take advantage of available resources.
CDNs Speed Up Websites Through Improved Security
We mentioned that CDN providers can speed your website by providing better and more secure encryption. This same goes against deliberate attacks targeting your website.
Most types of attacks take advantage of web servers’ or DNS servers’ vulnerabilities to get them unstable or force them to crash. CDN providers defend their networks -and the clients they work with- against such attacks and malicious activities.
Even in case of an attack resulting in success, CDN providers have multiple backup systems to keep their operations running in such cases. This may not directly increase the site speed but definitely prevents it from slowing down or becoming completely inaccessible due to an attack.
Conclusion
Taking advantage of a CDN provider is not a complex process. But like any other services, it must be considered consciously and carefully before picking the CDN provider that you’ll work with.
An ideal CDN provider should be able to provide all the benefits above. In Medianova, we provide all of these benefits and these are some of the benefits we can provide regarding and supporting only the speed aspect of a website.
Medianova is one the fastest https secure CDN providers in Eastern and Central Europe based on Cedexis real user data. Specifically experienced in streaming, encoding, cloud storage, caching, micro caching, hybrid CDN and website acceleration; Medianova’s 100% SSD powered anycast network footprint is spread amongst 20 countries.
