Seasoned and skilled network admins know that CDN or content delivery network is one of the most important things in a network. According to Cloudflare, CDN is the geographically distributed group of servers which are needed and works together to provide fast delivery of content on the Internet. While CDN is always confused as a web host, the difference between a web host and a CDN is big. Instead of web hosting, the CDN utilizes caching to lessen the bandwidth and to make the content secure. There’s a lot of benefits when CDN is efficiently used and monitored. CDN performance affects a lot of things on a website. One of these benefits is improving website load times via CDN optimization. This is done by channeling the content to a physical CDN server closest to the client. Speedy website loading has a benefit in SEO because speedy it prevents a higher bounce rate. People tend to close the tab on slow websites. The usage of CDN is also a good way to save bandwidth costs because CDN reduces bandwidth consumption. Caching and other optimizations causes a reduction in bandwidth usage. Another benefit of using CDN servers is the reduction of hardware failures because of the large amount of traffic, which can lead to a temporary shutdown of the site. With its nature, CDN is known to handle more traffic and can endure hardware failure, which is common problems in original web hosting methods. In addition, more content can be delivered, which means lesser time to wait for digital consumption. A CDN is also known to improve the security of content delivery. It mitigates DDoS attacks. better security certifications, and other security optimizations that can be done to transfer content. Because of its benefits, a lot of websites now uses CDN because it gets rid of the problems that are usually found on traditional web hosts. It is also a cheaper alternative because of decrease in infrastructure cost. Overall, a CDN gives a better page performance than traditional web hosting in both the desktop version and the mobile version of your website. To make CDN more reliable and helpful to your network, it is better to use a CDN monitoring tool that can give insights to CDN’s aspects like performance, load balancing, latency, and availability. A good CDN monitor allows the user to monitor CDN point locations, response time and latency as well as page objects. It is also good to have an insight for your page load times, loss, fetch time and more to see if more page optimizations are needed. When a CDN is monitored, it would be easier to diagnose if there is a looming threat that can crash your website (or already crashing your website). It is recommended to use high-performance CDN to make your content delivery better and improve the user experience. If your website serves a specific area, it is recommended to move your servers close to the CDN closer of the area for optimal performance.
