CDN is one of the most common words we are hearing these days in web hosting industry. When you try any performance evaluation tool for your website speed test, one error it will show is Content Delivery Network not used. This is mostly used by the large websites to cater their website visitors who are geographically diversified.
A Content Delivery Network means a collection of multiple web servers geographically distributed across various locations and delivering the content to the users more efficiently. Using this user will be automatically identified and served the content from the network server whose proximity is nearer or the server with the quickest response time will be chosen.
Advantages:
Most of the loading time is spent on download the contents of the page like images, scripts, CSS and Flash etc. Instead of changing your application architecture to Grid or cluster as discussed in the recent articles you can also opt for this content delivery network option to improve the performance of your application. Majority of the components in any web application or website are images, JS files, stylesheets, flash etc. This way you can reduce the response time easily and loading them using CDN will increase the performance and speed up the website or application.
Disadvantages:
When you try to redesign your web application to work on content distributed network, depends on the application you might need to change your application architecture. Changing the architecture could create issues with synchronizing the sessions state, database transactions replications and cached content. So before you choose to set up your application on CDN, you need to analyse how it works and take a decision.
Here are the companies who are providing cost-effective CDN solutions Softlayer, Akamai technologies, limilight networks and mirror image. For small and medium size portals this option is not feasible while the large companies who has huge audience can use this and reduce response times and improve the performance of the website or application.
For more information on how to setup and configure your web application over CDN; call us at 09949922500 or mail to info@ibeehosting.com