Content Delivery Networks

Why You Need a CDN Service?

Sure, you can use a regular shared server if your website has a reasonable data transfer activity each month, but when you are hosting large files and providing streaming services on your website, the limitation of the shared server can eventually ruin the experience of your website visitors. The server may crash due to overload of activity, which can happen anytime, especially during peak traffic. This is where CDN is needed for you, since it can optimize the content delivery process of your website and ensure stable and reliable performance.

What Is a CDN?

Content Delivery Network acts as the host of your content, or even the entire website, and ensures fast delivery of the content within your website. Your website visitors can stream the videos within your website, or they can download any file from your website, with ease and without any performance drop. This is because of the technology within the CDN platform itself that allows accelerated content delivery and the application of POP servers, which allows you to deliver your website content from the nearest server from your visitor location.

Pay As You Go Pricing vs. Other Types Of Pricing

Some providers may offer Pay As You Go pricing plan, which is the most common, and some others may offer different pricing plans based on various factors. For instance, they may set the price per website instead of per bandwidth. Or they may offer a pricing plan that is set per certain bandwidth limit per month. To pick the best CDN provider for your business, you need to take a look at the amount of data transfer within your website. From there, you can decide which pricing plan is good for you. For instance, if you have a low data transfer, you should choose a service with Pay As You Go pricing plan instead of a service which offers pricing per certain bandwidth limit.

Security Features

A good CDN provider should give the maximum protection for your content, as well as flexible customization options for delivering your content. It should provide protection against attacks from various threats, such as hackers and malicious software. You should also be able to customize the way to deliver your content, by restricting certain people from accessing your content, creating a secure link or token to allow people to access your content, and enforcing additional verification steps. SSL is also a good feature that you should consider, and a good CDN provider should provide the basic shared SSL service for free or included within your subscription.

The Number of Data Centers

The more data centers that a CDN service has, the better your website performance will be. This is true, since the more widespread the data centers of the content delivery netowork provider, the wider the range that it can reach. It means that no matter from where people try to access or download your content, they are always getting the maximum speed for their download because they can always connect to the nearest server. However, this is not the sole aspect that you need to look at. The hardware infrastructure of the server itself is important. SSD-powered servers can provide faster performance as compared with servers that use standard drives.

Conclusion

In choosing the best Content Delivery Network for your business, there are three important aspects that you need to look at. First, you need to look at the pricing plan and match your data transfer activity with their price. Second, you need to consider the security features of the platform itself, whether you can customize various security options within the platform and whether you get maximum protection against threats and attacks from hackers, spammers, and so on. Third, you need to consider the platform infrastructure itself, whether they can provide you with the maximum speed and performance that you need. The number of their data centers is a good indication of their overall server performance.