Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network can be expressed as a network of proxy servers distributed geographically. The primary objective is to deliver service geographically to end-users for quality purposes. Content Delivery Networks cater a considerably large portion of the content available on the internet these days. Which includes web objects like graphics, texts and scripts and also the downloadable objects like software documentation and media files, applications like e-commerce and portals, social networks, live streaming., popular on-demand media.

What is CDN?

A CDN is made up of two major components that are; Point of Presence (PoP) and edge servers.

PoPs are used to determine the geographical location of the CDN servers. These servers are assigned and located all over the world and cover an impressive considerable distance

Each PoP has servers situated, those servers are known as edge servers which are nothing but proxy caches. They work similarly as your cache in your browser by the content distribution channels.

As explained earlier, A Content Delivery Network is nothing but a network of proxy servers which are assigned and scattered all across the globe. Bigger nations might have different PoPs.

It hardly matters whether you use a small blog or are a sizeable e-commercial website, you will avail at least some sort of benefit from Content Delivery Networks.

The advantages of CDN are listed below:

Though your web hosting is providing their best to improve performance they are limited to the particular location like USA servers or Canada or some other countries, but CDN are having all over the world, so they are ready to serve your website content from there server to the nearest location. Thus your visitors are accessing the content from their country, not from the USA or other countries. So the distance of delivery is getting minimized.

• Scalability
• SEO
• Security
• Performance
• Cost efficiency
• Reliability

Scalability

Scalability is the potential of a network or an organization’s growth. With the right Content Delivery Network (CDN) you get the liberty of choice. Whether it’s blogging based on content or a multi-site website. Quality provisions will not be compromised. Scalability is an advantage where you can offload traffic to a delivery network to maintain and manage traffic seamlessly. You can have control over the momentum as to whether spike it up or slow it down as per your requirements taking no longer than a short span of time. The result is the increase in Up-Time on your server.

Security

A Content Delivery Network Provides add-on security. The more significant portion of the traffic will not be served from the origin server since the edge servers that is the CDN provider. This will in return permit them to alleviate DDoS attacks for you. Content Delivery Networks allow you to attain SSL certificates similarly as you would with your website Host. Assuring you the encryption between edge and Origin servers. Make sure you are having an optimized .htaccess rules too for the better website speed optimization and also security from your safe side.

SEO

The speed at which the page loads is as critical as the page ranking. Users tend to disregard the pages with a very slow loading speed as they want quick results. That is why almost every search engine takes into account page loading in their algorithm.

Website speed also plays a vital role when the matter is about Google crawling pages. When your website is optimized and loads instantly then the frequency will also be increased where google crawls your page.

Users usually do not look past page 2 or 3. They believe that whatever content is better will show up in the first pages. It is very rare when you find yourself looking past page 2 and 3. You may only find yourself going past it when you’re doing some in-depth research.

Thus, Search Engine Optimisation enables pages to be indexed better.

Reliability

One thing is for sure that a CDN network is 9 out of 10 times always reliable. Sites will be routed to the nearest location, and if by any chance a server fails to pick it up, requests will be redirected to a server which is available. This will generate an automatic dismissal which will provide any tampering related to your efficiency.

Cost efficient

A Content Delivery Network requires less self-management when it comes to infrastructure.

This will prove to be economically helpful. Suppose you pay your web host based on bandwidth, with CDN its possible to reduce this because assets are mostly served from the cache on edge servers as opposed to directly from your Origin server which is your web host.

Many of the websites these days use CDN because they provide services for audiences situated globally and they want their content to be delivered as fast as possible. BuiltWith revealed that among the top 10,000 websites, more than 41% are using CDN.

CDN favors static content rather than dynamic content and here’s why –

Dynamic content is content that changes very often when someone loads a page. Its characteristics involve data being live, manipulated by HTML, etc. This is not well suited for something like CDN. Whereas Static data is more suitable for CDN where redeployment is mandatory for any change to take place.

CDN is a tool that reduces the latency and load time in delivering content to users across the globe.

Best Content Delivery Network Providers

The speed is significantly higher with CDN when compared to without CDN

Thus, there are numerous ways in where CDN can prove to be beneficial for your website. Considerably enhanced performance, SEO perks, great conversion rates and overall better experience for all the users (especially who are located further from their origin server).I have highlighted some of the known and also unknown top CDN providers who are doing great these days are given below :

Cloudflare

CloudFlare is one of most popular CDN Network provider in the whole world for its free service. It is also WordPress’ most reliable CDN network.

All in all, the CDN providers mentioned above are one of the world’s best all over the world. CDN network boosts your speed and offers security. They make your data load faster. Many tests have proven that with CDN, load speed was significantly faster when compared to no CDN. Some of them also offer a free SSL certificate, and some of them are free. There are a lot of reasons to opt for CDN. SEO optimization and performance are only some of them. You can also integrate Cloudflare with WP Rocket plugin for better speed boosting.

In conclusion, they offer reliability and make your work more convenient by making your users feel great about the services they provide. Data encryption is also guaranteed between Origin and edge servers.

Incapsula

Incapsula is most likely to be the best CDN provider as of early 2018. It’s a great provider excellent in both speed and security. Their security is not to be taken lightly at all as it provides a very advanced and secure administration. Plus, their speed is well known which makes the web pages load at zapping top speed.

Static file acceleration program works smoothly with more than sufficient caching and security. The plans it offers come with login protection and also CDN optimized balance technology.

Incapsula charges around $0.04 per gigabyte. With this pricing, users from all over the world will save a lot more money and will enjoy the benefits of speed and security. They also have a storage plan which might cost you around $0.9 per gigabyte a month at a more than affordable price.

Incapsula is one of the world’s best services, and if you are seeking for a fast, secure and great CDN at affordable prices then this is undoubtedly among the top players

CDN77

CDN77 is also a flexible and superfast provider who offers free SSL, HTTP/2, and Pay-as-you-go

Prices which range from $49/TB or in some cases even $8/TB

CDN77 is a dynamic content delivery network, unlike Incapsula which a static delivery network.

CDN77 comes through in every aspect whether its speed, features, global online presence, storage, etc.

CDN77 is also very cost efficient with more than 28 points of presence across the globe.

CDN77 is also well-known for its new feature ASAP like HTTP/2, TLS1.3 or brotli compression.

Key CDN

Key CDN is also another decent CDN provider who offers similar features and services like Max CDN. Well, it certainly has more affordable rates than that of Max CDN

Key CDN has ridiculously powerful and highly optimized SSD servers which can be located all across the world. Their data centers are also in North America, Asia, Europe and Australia alike.

Their designs are made concerning low latency, and top-notch performance which they are successfully doing so.

CacheFly

CacheFly has proven itself to be the fastest through various tests. CacheFLy also offers 100% availability guarantees on its servers.

Some of CacheFly’s customers are Toyota, Microsoft, Honda, Adobe, etc.

CDN.net

This network loads websites through 170 different locations across the world. CDN.net offers a free trial of 1TB for 30 days