CDN services help a business to speed up the work of a website or online resource, optimize the playback of video content and organize uninterrupted online broadcasting for an audience of any size and territorial distance
Why Content Delivery Networks (CDN) Technology Is Needed
The Internet is the main source of communication with the outside world: from telecommuting and education, shopping for goods, food, household appliances and real estate to communicating with friends, colleagues, family and friends. Every year there is more and more “heavy” content on the Internet, and the popularity of streaming services is gaining momentum.
The speed of loading and operation of online services directly affects audience loyalty: in today’s dynamic world, no one is used to waiting. Also, modern search services evaluate the loading speed of a website and an online resource. The higher the loading speed, the higher the site will be in the search engine results. For example, Google ranks pages in search based on their load times, and Facebook has announced that it will prioritize links that load quickly in its news feed. Facebook employees found out that people refuse to visit pages that take a long time to load. Along with a drop in traffic, business profits also decrease, so network speed is very important for the distribution of any content.
A technical solution to speed up the distribution – CDN, a geographically distributed network infrastructure for fast delivery of content to users of services, applications and sites. CDN servers are geographically located so as to minimize the response time of the site to the user. A CDN consists of several parts:
- Origin – the server that stores the source files or data distributed via the CDN;
- PoP (point of presence, point of presence) – a caching server as part of a CDN in a specific geographic location. The term Edge is also used to refer to these servers ;
- dynamic content that is generated on the server when the request is received;
- static content that is stored on the server unchanged.
Distribution across servers in different parts of the world provides access even during peak loads. Also, CDN helps to reduce the risk of losing access to the service due to a fall of the main server: the content will be available all the time while you are recovering.
Who uses CDN
CDN is suitable for businesses in Russia and abroad. Using a CDN will reduce delays, provide fast content distribution and improve the user experience.
Organizations often use CDNs during marketing campaigns, sales seasons and during those periods when the number of end customers can be uncontrollable, and the actual infrastructure of the organization is not able to process the entire volume of traffic and requests, which can lead to the fall of the organization’s website at a strategically important time.
The technology can also be useful to developers of mobile applications, recently there have been special solutions focused on distributing content to mobile devices – Mobile CDNs. Many large CDN providers offer such services, such as Akamai or Amazon.
CDNs are also used by companies focused on the distribution of gaming, multimedia content and streaming services. If the number of users of your service is growing, look for a CDN to optimize, speed up the distribution and reduce the load on the main servers.
How to find a reliable CDN provider
The speed and efficiency of a CDN depends on the availability of interfaces with telecom operators. For example, a CDN provider with points of presence in 100 cities, but with a small number of joints, may have a longer delay than a provider whose points of presence are located in several cities, but there are much more joints with telecom operators. Unfortunately, in most cases CDN providers do not publish such information, so everything can be checked only by testing:
- pay attention to the number of points of presence, which is relevant for projects with an international audience;
- check if the CDN provider supports the technologies and protocols you need;
- clarify the information about points of presence in the regions you are most interested in and compare it with the potential audience of the site;
- often CDN providers provide analysis of consumption statistics, management of caching policies and HTTP headers, preloading of very “heavy” content (from 200 MB), full and selective clearing of the cache.
How MegaFon CDN works
Imagine that you need to speed up an online store website, offload your own infrastructure and increase conversions, and you don’t have the money and time to deploy your own infrastructure. At the same time, content for users across Russia is loaded faster, ensuring the stable operation of the store even during peak loads like sales.
The service from MegaFon allows the customer to instantly build up their own infrastructure and reach an audience of any size, regardless of the territorial distance, to provide their own services or hold an action.
CDN service from MegaFon has a large number of joints with cell towers, therefore it works quickly and efficiently both on fixed communication channels and on the mobile network. The service will speed up the work of the site, optimize the playback of media content and organize uninterrupted online broadcasting for an audience of any size, CDNs from MegaFon are used by leading online cinemas.
- MegaFon is the only CDN built on the basis of its own backbone network, the company fully controls the network and equipment.
- CDN from Megafon has no scalability restrictions: the Russian network capacity is more than 1 TB per second, in the world – more than 8 TB per second. The service is built on server and network equipment from leading enterprise-class vendors HPE and Cisco
- As a mobile operator, Megafon has the best network connectivity for delivering content to mobile users. According to Cedexis tests, Megafon has the best delivery speeds in Russia.
- Megafon’s CDN operates on all five continents. The quality of delivery speed is improved by special physical joints with eight traffic exchange points.
Also, the CDN from MegaFon has built-in protection against DDoS attacks, and in the event of an attack on the customer’s resource, he will direct the attack on himself, while the customer’s online resources will remain available and continue to function fully.