One of the main reasons of CDN popularity now days is Google (and other searching engines). Google has started using pagespeed as a ranking factor, that’s why website CDN (and boosting that it can give) is now in use of many businesses and webmasters. CDN however provide a faster experience for customers (users) and this definitely influence on users satisfaction and consequently – on sells. An additional reason of CDN popularity – is a big growth of mobile users, who more depend on speed than usual desktop users with stable internet connections.
A content delivery network, CDN, is a collection of web servers located in different geographical areas to deliver content faster and more efficiently to users in each geographic region or area. Mechanism chose a server for delivering content to a specific user based on a different evidence. It can be server with fewest network hops or it can be a server with a quickest respond time. Anyway, it is typically based on measure of network proximity. The result of a website CDN is a far speedier service for the end user, which consequently influence on the customers experience.
CDN Boosting can be shown in improving of site’s loading time, improving performance in local search and maximizing website’s uptime. As it stated above, loading times are critical ranking factors for search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing; therefore improving of site’s loading time make it better in terms of SEO. Better performance in local search by CDN is achieved by allowing website to rank in local search results all over the globe; this leads to extending of site’s global reach. One of the side benefits of CDN boosting is improving of website’s uptime assurance; with CDN even if one server goes down, website will be served elsewhere on a regionally based server. Despite all the above there are situations, when CDN is not the optimal and advisable action. First of all using CDN is costly, for some companies it isn’t worth the outlay. CDN is really more a tool for bigger established websites than small sites with a small business area. In addition, there are other far cheaper alternatives to make website load faster for small websites. Another thing, which may require attention is blocking of CDN IP address by some organizations, or even countries (it is really uncommon, more so in Far East and for popular free CDN services).
If decision of website CDN is taken, there are few steps to make a CDN host for a website. First, it is important to make sure that all other processes to improve the website done before creating a CDN account. There are plenty of CDN services and companies, both paid and free, from which to choose based on price, quality, geographic spread of servers and other reasons. When the CDN company selected, it is relatively simple to set up a CDN for the site. All the actions can be divided in three groups – creating and accessing to CDN account, creating a CDN resource and setting up the CDN to work with the website. Basically, to create a CDN recourse means to choose data, which should work with CDN. While setting up the CDN, geographical location of servers will be selected and CNAME (name of urls in CDN) will be created.