Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are the transparent backbone of the Internet in charge of content delivery. Whether we know it or not, each of us interacts with multiple CDNs on a daily basis; when reading articles on news sites, shopping online, watching YouTube videos, or reading on social media.
No matter what you do or what type of content you consume, you’re likely to find a CDN behind every character of text, every image pixel, and every movie frame that reaches your PC and mobile browser.
To understand why CDNs are so widely used, you first need to denmark phone number list the problem they’re designed to solve; reducing website latency.
What is latency?
Latency is the annoying delay that occurs from the moment you request a web page to load to the moment its content appears on the screen.
This delay interval is affected by a number of factors, many of which are specific to a given web page. In all cases, however, the length of the delay is affected by the physical distance between you and that website's hosting server. A CDN's mission is to virtually shorten that physical distance, with the goal of improving the speed and performance of site rendering.
How does a CDN work?
To minimize the distance between visitors and your website server, a CDN stores a cached version of your content in multiple geographic locations (aka, points of presence or PoPs). Each PoP contains multiple caching servers responsible for delivering content to visitors who are located near it.
In essence, a CDN places your content in many places at once, providing superior coverage to your users.
For example, when someone in London accesses your US-hosted website, they do so through a local UK PoP. This is much faster than traveling across the Atlantic and back.
Here's how a CDN works in a nutshell. Our packages include use of the most extensive network, the Google Cloud CDN. This CDN operates caches in over 90 PoPs spread across the globe.