Five Techwe are
Oct 13, 2014

Content Delivery Networks

With CloudFlare and Amazon CloudFront content delivery networks are becoming affordable for everyone. What are CDNs and should you be using one?

For a majority of small to medium sized websites your site is hosted on a single server somewhere. If your website host management  is with Five Technology this is either in Minneapolis, Chicago, or Dallas. All your customers,  regardless of their location in the world, connect to this server to request resources for displaying your webpages. Your website may be using a CDN without even knowing it. We use Google’s CDN for including libraries like JQuery when developing websites.

CDNs take over your DNS, the system that translates your website name into a server address. Instead of returning the same address as DNS normally does, the CDN replies with an address for a server that is geographically close to your customer. This could be the west coast, east coast, Europe, etc. This is beneficial to your website in a few ways.

1.) Makes the website “snappier” by caching and serving static content like images, css files, and javascript files physically closer to their destination. A faster load time not only provides a better customer experience, but will also help your organic search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.  It takes many requests to build one page and the sum of all those saved milliseconds can be perceived.

2.) CDNs have built in security features to identify and block unwanted traffic.

3.) As a result of #1 and #2 the server hosting the website has more resources to use on important things like making database queries.

Five Technology has tested out these CDNs with great success. Contact us for more information.

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