With CDN’s The World Is Yours Faster
When you’re developing your web strategy it’s important to understand all the available options for boosting your sites performance. One technology that is addressing the big picture in performance is the content delivery network or CDN.
A content delivery network uses multiple servers in various geographic locations to improve the delivery of static and streaming content. The way they work is that any content requests are automatically routed to the closest server geographically to where the request originated. This allows content to be delivered faster using lower bandwidth. Latency and Search Engines
Search engines are becoming much more stringent in terms of ranking sites. One factor they examine is your sites load time. Long load times can penalize your site with the search engines and result in lower rankings. CDNs address several issues and solve problems such as improving global availability and reducing bandwidth use, but the most important factor they address is the latency issue.
Latency is defined as the amount of time it takes for a host server to receive process and deliver on a request for a page resource. The amount of time it takes for a sites content to load depends largely on the distance between the user making the request and the host server. This load time can be compounded based on the number of resources a page contains.
As an example, if your page is hosted on a server in Boston and a user from Paris is visiting your page, then each request needs to travel from Paris to Boston and back to Paris. If your site contains 100 elements or objects, this round trip has to happen 100 times before your site loads. Typical load times fall between 75 – 140 ms this can increase significantly especially if the site is being accessed through a mobile device over a 3G network.
A content delivery network addresses this issue by distributing identical static resources on servers throughout a vast network spread regionally or worldwide. By bringing resources closer to where requests are generated, the latency time is significantly reduced. For example, the visitor in Paris can be redirected to s server located locally in France. Now requests are sent from Paris to a local server. Lower Latency = Higher Search Ranking
Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. Today, sites are being penalized for long load times. The growth of broadband has also created unprecedented traffic jams and bottlenecks. High-speed connections do little for users if content loads slowly. As connection speed has increased, customer patience has decreased. Visitors expect fast loading content and high quality streamed content to be delivered on demand. Search engines are responding to customer preferences.
CDN technology relies on redundancy for fail-safe protection. Duplicating content and distributing it among various geographically diverse servers protects your content from data loss and degradation of images. The main upside is distributed content loads faster and gives your visitors a seamless almost immediate experience. Plus, content delivery networks are loved by search engines!
Topics: CDN