What is a CDN? – Content Delivery Network
Understand how GoCache’s platform improves the performance, security and avaiability of your website, e-commerce, mobile app or API.
What is a CDN?
CDN is the acronym for Content Delivery Network. It is a network of servers that store a copy of the content of its websites in memory (cache) to be delivered to visitors based on their geographic location, conecting them to the closer server and reducing the data transfer time (latency).
The CDN will also communicate with the origin server in order to deliver any content that has not been previously stored in cache. Also, its use allows for better protection against DDoS attacks and helps maintain high availability, since its infrastructure utilizes different datacenters simultaneously.
Content Delivery Networks are used both for B2B interaction and end user content delivery.
Today, as more and more aspects of everyday life move online, content delivery networks are used to speed up static and dinamic content, mobile apps, e-commerce transactions, video, voice, games, etc.
To learn more read the article in this link about the 12 benefits of using a CDN.
Today your website works this way (without a Content Delivery Network):
The visitors reach the origin server, with higher latency and resource consumption
Your website users receive content directly from your origin server (where the pages are hosted), regardless of where this server is located. The further the user is from this location, the higher will be the latency (response time) in the access to the site.
Besides, each visitor receives all the files directly from the origin server, which results in higher load on CPU and memory resources, as well as bandwidth consumption to send this data from the server to the visitor.
Visitation Peaks make your website slow or bring the server offline
Due to the load caused on your server by each single user on your site , the increase in the amount of simultaneous visitors can quickly become a problem. Moreso if this increase happens suddenly, as the result of a promotion or viralization of content.
Just when you have the chance to increase your sales or your advertisors’ exposure, your webserver becomes overloaded and slow, or even goes down.
Your site is vulnerable to attacks, hack and exploits
If you use some sort of CMS (WordPress, Magento, etc.), it is common that your website gets “scanned” frequently in search of know vulnerabilities in such platforms, yet you don’t know this is going on.
Unless you have an anti-DDoS service in place, it is very likely that your website will be taken down if you suffer such an attack.
With GoCache it will work like this:
Better performance, engagement and conversions
With our platform the time it takes to open your website/shop gets considerably lower. This improves your visitors’ engagement and, consequently, your e-commerce‘s conversion rates, or your site’s ad revenues, increase.
Higher availability, more sales and reduced costs
GoCache will absorb a great volume of visits without requesting resources from your origin server. This significantly increases the capacity to serve visitation peaks without the need for investments in additional infrastructure resources.
Protection against attacks and vulnerabilites, your site online longer, generating more money
Due to its robust and distributed arquitecture, our content delivery network has capacity to mitigate DDoS and syn flood attacks, with no additional costs related.
We also make avaiable a Web Application Firewall (WAF), which helps protect against XSS, SQL Injection and allow you to filter your traffic by geolocation, IP and much more.
Better SEO and SEM – more visits and sales
Your site will be better positioned on SEO, since the search egines consider site opening speed an important factor in the total score for results rankings. Besides, as your site navigates faster the bounce rates will also drop, helping increase even further your positioning.
Save money with server infrastructure and data-transfer
You will be able to cut down on server infrastructure needed to absorb both your regular and peak demand, since GoCache absorbs most of the requests that were being served by these resources.
This post is also available in: Portuguese (Brazil)