How does… a content delivery network work?
We ask some of the industry’s most knowledgable boffins to break down jargon to help you through those confusing meetings and indecipherable conferences. Here, George P. Johnson’s Chris Hogben explains how a content delivery network works.
A crucial part of any successful website is optimisation – both visually with intelligent UI choices and through performance and architecture leveraged to ensure the user experience delivered is as good as possible.
Research shows that users expect a response within two to three seconds when interacting with software and websites, with anything over three seconds resulting in a noticeable loss in user satisfaction.
One of the key ways a website can be optimised is by using a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN accelerates the delivery of content to users while also adding another layer of security to your site, resulting in a better user experience and a safer site.
To really work well you have to design the content to work with the CDN. If you miss that WordPress is using a database behind the front page to handle comments and feedback (for instance) a dumb deployment of WordPress to a CDN might buy you a lot less than you expected.
CDN come in all shapes and sizes. Rolling your own is not for the faint hearted but equally going with a major incurs costs you may not need. CloudFlare is more of a content acceleration system than a CDN but for many sites works as well as akamai would. ‘it depends’