Your website is viewed by international audience, so optimizing it to perform efficiently and provide a positive user experience is fundamental for capturing your audience’s attention. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are powered by servers that act as intermediate hosting points for your website by caching certain data from websites and providing it to other servers upon request. It is an effective technique to both enhance user experience and balance load on the actual server.
Advantages of CDN
A CDN is critical for your website to flourish and improve its performance to provide to a greater number of viewers. Following are the main advantages of deploying a Content Delivery Network.
More Downloads with Multiple Domains: Web browsers normally allow four simultaneous downloads from a single CDN. Because there are multiple domains with CDNs, more files can be downloaded at the same time.
Caches to Reduce Loading Time: By using caches, a website previously visited does not need its major components to be loaded again, which reduces loading time.
Scalability and Reliability: CDNs provide your website reliability that content will be available even if the servers are unavailable since it is present in CDNs, even if the main server is down. They allow the server to handle a greater load than it is built for since it can be distributed over the CDN.
Faster Download Speeds: Since CDNs can be located internationally, audience can benefit from fast download speeds even if they are away from the main servers as the CDN servers are there to provide the files. While it enhances the performance of your website loading speed, the web design features look even better and more interactive to users.
Website Performance Enhancement
Because CDNs provide additional resources for your website, it benefits from significant performance boosts such as reduced ping, packet loss during communication and reduce overall loading speed for viewers.
CDNs to Choose for your Website
The following 7 CDNs provide quality and functionality in their free plans to evaluate their services.
- KeyCDN
A combination of affordable packages and functionality, KeyCDN is the choice of small businesses and bloggers when looking to deploy a CDN with features and scalability in at a reasonable price range. Their entire servers utilize SSD technology and conform with SSAE 16. It also boasts a high degree of compatibility with many CMSs currently being used, which makes it a popular choice for both small and large businesses alike.
- ImpervaIncapsula
If you are looking to decrease the bandwidth usage and keep content available at the fingertips of your viewers, Incapsula is at your service. Their caching techniques are a cut above the rest, which significantly decreases the time required to load pages. Their web services include traffic analysis, load distribution and failsafe protocols which ensure your content remains accessible even if the main server is not responding. Moreover, Incapsula’s advanced security services including anti DDoS countermeasures make it a solid contender for providing both security and functionality for your website.
- Microsoft Azure CDN
Developed to cater to websites which handle heavy loads of traffic, Microsoft Azure CDN is a reputable CDN which significantly boosts website loading time, enhances streaming and allows your viewers to easily access your content while keeping your website performance top notch. It provides a host of features combined with ASP.NET. cloud hosting, which makes it the perfect choice for websites that require cloud services. With features designed while keeping in mind website requirements and to provide uncomplicated usage, it is the perfect choice if you are looking for a simple CDN which at the same time provides quality performance enhancement for your website.
- CloudFlare
CloudFlare is among the most popular of CDNs currently in the market as they provide their services under a variety of plans. Their networking is arguably the best as it is designed to keep content accessible even if half of the network becomes unresponsive.
They combine techniques such as advanced networking, load distribution, backup servers and security services to ensure your target audience experience a streamlined user experience despite their location or even if the network experiences issues. Their complex analytics system provides you the option to remove possible threats altogether by restricting access and removing elements if they exhibit a specific behavior, which allows you to take preemptive action before an issue even starts to develop.
- Rackspace
If you are searching for a robust CDN that provides a high level of security, Rackspace is what you are searching for. They guarantee virtually zero percent downtime through their failsafe techniques and RAID-10 SSD, which adjust itself according to different threat levels.
In case you wish to maintain confidentiality in your communications, its three layer protocols ensure your information remains secure. The scalable plans allow you to pay as your file size increases or if you require more services. It is designed to suit large businesses which operate with enormous quantity of data.
- JsDelivr
JsDelivr is a very adaptable CDN whose features are developed to provide maximum functionality to developers and webmasters. It supports hosting for many different file formats, ranging from jQuery and JavaScript to CSS. It utilizes multiple CDNs to ensure that services remain uninterrupted in case one network experiences issues.
Equipped with smart load balancing capabilities, it checks performance of servers and viewers in real time and if one of the server experiences issues, it can reroute the users to a different server to ensure they continue to receive content without hindrance. It also allows multiple file download requests from a single HTTP request.
- MaxCDN
With servers present in over 90 countries, MaxCDN is a stable choice to turn to for web speed optimization as their servers utilize SSD technology to improve loading speed for images and heavy components. Integrating MaxCDN with existing CMS is not an issue as it is compatible with many widely used ones such as WordPress and Magento.
Your account is secured via two-step verification process and the Secure Socket Layer integrated with the service boosts security regarding your website and any malicious attacks against it. Their built in features allow you to control what data should be caches in which server, which enables optimization to provide related data set based on demographics.
Based on these 7 popular CDNs, you can choose one which suits your objectives and benefit from their services.
Author Bio:
Asad Ali is a seasoned digital marketer with a work experience of more than 7 years in serving the eCommerce and web design industries. His expertise in implementing purposeful marketing strategies has allowed him to work for some of the noble companies including Go-Gulf Dubai that is a premium web development company. You can reach him on Linkedin.
