How CDN WORKS? A ultimite guide from spacecdn

Content delivery networks (CDN) are the transparent backbone of the Internet in charge of content delivery. Whether we know it or not, every one of us interacts with CDNs on a daily basis; when reading articles on news sites, shopping online, watching YouTube videos or perusing social media feeds.ucdn is one of cheapest cdn provider

No matter what you do, or what type of content you consume, chances are that you'll find CDNs behind every character of text, every image pixel and every movie frame that gets delivered to your PC and mobile browser.

To understand why CDNs are so widely used, you first need to recognize the issue they're designed to solve. Known as latency, it's the annoying delay that occurs from the moment you request to load a web page to the moment its content actually appears onscreen.

That delay interval is affected by a number of factors, many being specific to a given web page. In all cases however, the delay duration is impacted by the physical distance between you and that website's hosting server. A CDN's mission is to virtually shorten that physical distance, the goal being to improve site rendering speed and performance.

How a CDN Works

To minimize the distance between the visitors and your website's server, a CDN stores a cached version of its content in multiple geographical locations (a.k.a., points of presence, or PoPs). Each PoP contains a number of caching servers responsible for content delivery to visitors within its proximity.

In essence, CDN puts your content in many places at once, providing superior coverage to your users. For example, when someone in London accesses your US-hosted website, it is done through a local UK PoP. This is much quicker than having the visitor's requests, and your responses, travel the full width of the Atlantic and back.

This is how a CDN works in a nutshell. Of course, as we thought we needed an entire guide to explain the inner workings of content delivery networks, the rabbit hole goes deeper.

How to activate the CDN?

In order for a CDN to know which objects belong to which request, a Supername / Origin Server combination needs to be registered with the CDN. A Supername is a subdomain of a domain controlled by the customer, like images.mydomain.com for instance. The Origin Server reflects the internet path to the objects that are to be served from the CDN. After registering both pieces of information with the CDN, it knows which objects belong to what subdomain.

Integrating the CDN.

The only thing that is required to integrate the CDN is to update local references to files in the source code for a website or application, to the full URL of the object. If we continue the example for http://images.mydomain.com/logo.png, the first time the CDN receives a request for logo.png, it will collect it from the Origin Server and put it in it's cache. Every subsequent request for logo.png will be significantly faster.

Be aware that, in order to gain the maximum benefit of the CloudVPS CDN, some changes to your site could be needed. Static files that can be used in the CDN might be combined and dynamic elements might have to be separated and loaded at a later stage.

Hopefully, this CDN tutorial helps clear up the questions of “what is CDN” and “how does a CDN work?”. Having a solid understanding of caching and how a CDN can help boost the delivery speed and scalability of your website will assist both with visitor retention and return. Depending upon where your visitors are originating from in regards to where your origin server is located, a CDN can have a major affect on speed.

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