What is a CDN, and why is it worth dealing with? How much does it cost and what benefits will we get. These are some of the questions we hear recently on a technology that is now economically accessible and should be on most websites.
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is basically a group of servers – spread across different countries around the world – that work together to deliver content online. A CDN allows you to quickly transfer items needed to load content online, including HTML pages, CSS and JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.
CDN services are increasing in popularity these days as most of the online traffic is served through CDN More well-known companies like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon have done the same. In fact, a properly configured CDN will protect your website against hacking or DDOS.
Although CDN is not a hosting service, your blog should be hosted somewhere before CDN service can work and connect CDN is an additional feature that will speed up your blog quite a bit, giving your visitors a faster and more enjoyable experience.
How does a CDN work?
A CDN is a network of servers around the world and takes responsibility for serving your website’s data ( usually those that are heavy and do not change often, such as CSS, images, & JavaScript code ) to each visitor from the loop closest to it. For example, a visitor to our website from America will load the website from an American server while a visitor from Greece will load the website from a Greek server. As a result, we’re getting very fast turnaround times for all visitors, no matter where they are.
In essence, a website is hosted not only on a server in the country of origin but at the same time on a Greek server for Greeks, an English server for English, an American server for Americans, etc.
At the same time, the website is loaded from the CDN and not from our own servers, resulting in fewer requests to the server hosting our website and therefore requiring fewer resources to serve the website. As a result, it should load faster on our servers and website, as we have our own resources to serve significantly fewer requests.
What are the advantages of using a CDN service?
There are several things you can benefit from a CDN service with in mind to improve your SEO ranking, but you’ll see why below.
Speeds up page loading: When you have a CDN service, it means that every visitor who comes to your blog will get it from the nearest server. As a result, Google will see a higher speed score for your website and you will see your ranking increase.
It will reduce the bandwidth on your server: Bandwidth is obviously one thing that worries bloggers as the more people visit your blog, the more the bandwidth will increase. In most shared hosting packages, bandwidth is often quite limited, and to make sure you don’t overreach and you don’t have to pay more for a big server, with a CDN service you’ll save a lot of your precious bandwidth.
Greater security: A CDN service can increase your security from DDOS attacks if your server goes down by keeping your website open with a temporary cache left over until you fix the problem.
Minify Code: If you’ve heard the term “minify” before but panicked as it pertains to your blog code, the case for enabling minify on all your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files with the help of a CDN service is just a click away.
So now that you know some of the key benefits of a CDN service, it’s time to find the right one that meets your needs.
Cloudflare – Best Free CDN
Cloudflare is one of the largest companies in the entire world and probably the most popular CDN service available It offers a great free package for those interested in testing their service and some subscription packages for those who want to take advantage of more features, faster speeds, and more tools available.
While the free package is obviously nice, in reality, the difference between the free package and the cheapest package costs $20 a month is day-to-day. At $20 per month the speed increases dramatically, there’s a firewall, automatic mobile optimization, automatic TCP optimization, and most importantly, compression and optimization of photos – things not offered in the free service package.
Basically, with the free package, you get protection from DDOS attacks and a speed boost through the servers provided by the company, but only a limited number of customers enjoy all the servers, while the free users are limited to only some of them. With the free package, you’ll also be able to minify your most important files and you’ll see your blog score increase from websites like GTMetrix, Pingdom, and Google PageSpeed Insights.
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is basically a group of servers – spread across different countries around the world – that work together to deliver content online. A CDN allows you to quickly transfer items needed to load content online, including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.
To link your blog to CloudFlare, you first need to change the nameservers of your domain name given to you by the service and then install its WordPress plugin for a better cache setting or add it to the plugin cache you are already using.
Do you need a CDN for your website and how much does it cost you?
Websites that have potential customers or visitors from different countries in the country where the website is hosted can benefit from a CDN. For example, a tour desk or hotel that has visitors from all over the world will benefit the most from a CDN service.
Examples of the most beneficial are catering, tourism, vehicle rental, e-shop, transportation, technical services, logistics, etc. At the same time, it is an excellent solution even for companies whose website is hosted entirely by visitors from the country in which it is hosted, but the website is hosted on a server abroad.
Without going into suggestive details, a website with around 100-200 visitors per day and 3-10MB of data will cost around three to five USD per month. Of course, in calculating the cost, optimization of each website plays a role where necessary, using a cache, doing necessary minification, etc. to reduce the cost of CDN.
A CDN’s cost is only related to the amount of data transferred through its network. That is, the more traffic a site has, the more data will be transferred, so our costs will be higher. However, the price of a CDN is very low compared to the benefits it offers A feature of CDN costs is the variable cost/GB ratio, the more GB transferred, Transport and hosting costs are low.
Conclusion
We consider that in our days when the cost of a CDN is inversely proportional to the benefits we offer, CDN is an essential service for websites that want to maintain a professional presence and image on the internet.
