Question

What is a content delivery network, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of using a content delivery network. When do you think you should and should not use one, and why?

Answer 1

A content delivery network is a network of proxy server and their data center which are geographically distributed. It has the group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.

Everyone one of us interact with CDN on daily basis while reading articles on sites, shopping online or watching videos. CDN allows transfer of assets quickly which are needed for loading Internet content, this includes HTML pages, js files, images, videos etc. It has grown in popularity and still continue to grow. Today large chunk of web traffic is served through Content Delivery network. This traffic includes from major sites like Facebook, Netflix and Amazon.

Benefits of CDN depends on lot of factor which includes the size and need of an Internet property. The main advantages are:

1. Improves website load time: CDN improves the load time of a website by distributing content on a server which is closer to the visitor. This way visitor experiences fast page loading.
2. Increases content availability and redundancy: Large traffic can result in hardware failure and can interrupt normal website function. CDN helps managing more traffic and withstand hardware failure more efficiently.
3. Reduces bandwidth cost: The primary cost of hosting a website is consumption of bandwidth. With the help of CDN the amount of data that a origin server is supposed to provide, can be reduced. Which ultimately reduces the cost for owner of the website.

Every benefit comes with few disadvantages as well. CDN has following disadvantages-

1. CDN network doesn’t comes free and cost additional to the website owner.
2. This also adds complexity to the website which also complicates deployment procedure.
3. If the customer network have some network filter that block some content delivery network and prevent content from being loaded.