Guide to Setting up a CDN
04 Nov 2015

Guide to Setting up a CDN

In these later days more and more online businesses decide to use cdn tools. One of the main factors that influence on this process is the way how searching engines form their rankings. For example, among other things Google uses indicators for performance and page load time to determine the place of specific website in rankings. Other searching engines use similar mechanisms to form their rankings. Content delivery (distribution) networks allow every customer to improve such indicators as website’s performance, page load time, quality of streaming and other. Searching engines is not the only reason why online businesses use content distribution systems. The other very important thing nowadays is the website’s convenience for mobile devices. Due to the idea of mobile devices, they often have lower speed of the internet connection compared with the desktop computers. In other words, they depend on speed more than home computers. Accordingly, cdn performance makes websites more mobile-friendly (independently from presence or absence of a mobile version for an interface).

Setting of a content distribution network usually takes not so much time. Content distribution systems use multiple data-centers all over the world to make data content technologically closer to end users. The idea of this technology is to deliver requested content from approximate servers instead of doing that with the central (edge) server. That is why the second stage of setting (after signing up for a specific service) is to select data which will be stored in delivery servers. Such data are usually called cdn data. It is very important to select the right files for cdn delivery. Usually customers select data which cause many problems for users browsing from far of places – images, CSS files and javascript files. These files are called webpage resources. There are different variants of how websites cooperate with a content distribution network, but most likely HTML comes from the main server while other data comes from technologically closest delivery servers. When all delivery files are selected there it is very important step – to get them to the cdn servers. This step can be simple, but in the same time can cause many problems for a user – it depends on a specific service. Some of content distribution companies provide almost automatic way of how users load content data to their servers. In such companies sometimes it is enough to push the “load” button to do all processes. This applies particularly to WordPress or other common content management systems (CMSs). However, in some networks the process of getting files to the distribution servers is not so simple. Nonetheless, there are no reasons for a serious anxiety – a user should load the files only once and then system will copy them through other servers. Usually system allows users to set the cdn load balancing, which helps to optimize content distribution across multiple networks and platforms. Actually, the other steps to launch content distribution for the websites are quite simple – to name and check urls (CNAME) and to test the cdn from different locations. Thus, the above advantages of cdn far outweigh all possible disadvantages. Read