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What is a CDN and how it works?
- Authors
- Name
- Nico Bistolfi
- @nicobistolfi
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and are deployed in data centers. It is a large network designed to deliver all the content of your website accessing from the closest location. The advantage of this, is that the closer the CDN is located from the user, the faster the content will be delivered. A correct usage of a CDN could improve x10 faster than a normal Web Server or a storage service.
The CDN commitment is to speed up the website content. This will have a positive impact on your web performance and will help you to improve the User experience - faster content, happier clients ;)
This is an example of a CDN testing tool, that shows you the latency of different US locations. We could identify where some CDNs are located when we turn the improvements latency on, and suppose where CDNs are located regarding the results.
Each website has different and diverse content to deliver. Some CDNs are built to deliver JS, CSS or HTML files, and others are specifically designed to deliver images or/and videos. This will depend on the website you have, the CDN you will need, but we recommend:
- AWS (Amazon Web Services)
- Cloudflare
- Google Cloud Platform
CDN's are helpful to speed up the delivery process, but they are not very efficient when it comes to reducing file size. At Piio we go one level up than a normal CDN, because we use a CDN only when images are already optimized.
Piio Images currently uses the Amazon CloudFront CDN. It's amazingly reliable, and it has the best global coverage. It uses a worldwide network of 216 Points of Presence in 84 cities across 42 countries.
Here is the coverage of Piio: