Why Should You Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?

If you are running a website, you should know some of the factors that are key to your success:

• Relevant content
• Fast access
• Highly interactive interface
• Easily accessible from everywhere

Furthermore, your website should be able to run in a complex network environment in order to ensure good access experience for users from across the globe. With the increasing use of objects (such as images, frames, CSS, and APIs) and various actions (such as sharing and tracking), your website will also become larger in scale. Eventually, the system will get increasingly slower and it will lead to potential loss of customers.

Multiple studies from Google and other popular sites show that delays in access speeds, even as little as one second, will lead to a huge loss in terms of user numbers. To make matters worse, some of the users will never again attempt to access the website. As you can imagine, if the website is your main profit channel or brand window, delayed access speeds can be devastating to your business.

This is a major consideration when deciding whether you should be using a CDN – to accelerate website access.

In addition to content acceleration, CDN has other beneficial effects, such as:

1. Achieving Cross-Carrier, Cross-Region, Network-Wide Coverage

Networks that are not interconnected, regional ISP limitations, outbound bandwidth limitations, or other factors can make websites inaccessible on a regional basis. CDN acceleration can make full use of bandwidth resources, balance source station traffic, cover global lines, and deploy IDC resources locally. Furthermore, CDN provides edge distribution and storage nodes at backbone nodes across the country through cooperation with carriers. Alibaba Cloud has over 1000 nodes inside China and an additional 200+ nodes outside of China, covering most countries and regions. This ensures the stability and speed of CDN services.

2. Ensuring the Security of Your Website

Server Load Balancer and Distributed Storage technologies in CDN can improve your website's reliability, and provide protection for your website to deal with most Internet attacks. The anti-attack system also protects websites from malicious attacks. Alibaba Cloud CDN can be easily paired with Anti-DDoS and WAF products for enhanced security.

3. Achieving Remote Backup

When a server failure occurs, the system will invoke other nearby non-failed server nodes for service, to provide nearly 100% reliability. This will keep your website up and running 24/7.

4. Reducing Costs

When using CDN acceleration to establish websites throughout China, you do not have to purchase servers and follow-up hosting O&M, or mirror synchronization between servers. You also do not have to manage or maintain a team of technical experts to maintain these servers. By cutting down on CapEx and OpEx, you can focus your resources on more relevant matters.

5. Allowing You to Focus More on Business

CDN acceleration providers generally provide a one-stop service that are not limited to just CDN. They also provide corresponding cloud storage, big data services, and video cloud services. Most providers also provide 24/7 O&M monitoring support to ensure the network is available for use at any time. This frees you up from unnecessary tasks, helping you focus on the development of your core business.

These are some of the reasons you should use CDN. If there are any other benefits that you have experience from using CDN, please share in the comments below!