
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a cloud-based web performance and security tool, which helps firms in the public and private sectors with protection and speed acceleration of websites applications and other internet services against hackers. D...Read more
Amazon CloudFront helps businesses delivery their content over a secure and distributed network. In addition to increasing the speed and quality of delivered items, it also increases security of the application, allowing for prote...Read more
tiny.pictures is a real-time image processing content delivery network (CDN) which enables users to manipulate images in a range of formats to reduce file sizes and improve website load times. Users can resize, crop, trim, rotate,...Read more
Kollective is an enterprise content delivery network (ECDN) provider. The cloud-native enterprise peering platform leverages your existing network infrastructure to offset bandwidth constraints and deliver high-quality live events...Read more
ArvanCloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform designed to help businesses receive content from the nearest geolocation through proxy servers. With ArvanCloud’s cloud security solution,...Read more
Ideal for larger companies, Varnish Software's powerful caching technology helps the world's biggest content providers deliver lightning-fast web and streaming experiences for huge audiences, without downtime or loss of performanc...Read more
ImageKit.io is a complete image management and delivery solution for websites and apps that helps businesses deliver high-quality visuals without compromising performance. It simplifies the image management and delivery process wi...Read more
There are almost no businesses today that can grow without the internet, and the internet entirely depends upon both static and dynamic content. Whether it’s online retailers offering their products, or media and publishing companies offering the latest news or live videos, content makes the internet go around. Have you ever wondered how you are actually able to receive this information from your servers and send to the end user in just one click? The answer is usually a content delivery network (CDN) or CDN provider.
A content delivery network solution refers to globally distributed servers working together to ensure quick and seamless delivery of any kind of content over the internet with minimal delay. A CDN makes all this possible while bringing content closer to where users are through Points of Presence (PoPs) or strategically located data centers. It also includes caching servers which aim at accelerating webpage loading times and performance. Businesses rely on many different CDN services such as request routing, web caching, and server load balancing.
For example, some large video streaming companies utilize the network to deliver all the requested content by millions of users in a very short span of time or just a click.
This guide will give you a glimpse of the content delivery network landscape so that you can better understand which choice is right for your organization.
Here’s what we'll cover:
Content delivery network (CDN) software is a tool that is used to deliver internet content swiftly and effectively once the request comes from the end user. It allows for the quick exchange of data required at the time of loading content such as HTML pages, JavaScript files, images, and videos.
The software also provides end users with a distributed network of servers to ensure loading times for content and websites remain consistent throughout the world. These solutions can also help to protect websites from some basic malware attacks including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
A view of DDoS Protection in Cloudflare (Source)
Each system offers a unique mix of features. However, there are some common features in all content delivery network software solutions.
Application programming interface (API) | Allows the integration of the functionality of the platform with back-end services and databases. |
DDoS protection | Secures websites, applications, and entire networks without compromising legitimate traffic performance. |
Configuration management | Identify and maintain the components of the system (servers, configuration, or software) with problem configurations and reconfigure them to your desired state. |
Data encryption | Encrypt your business data so it can be accessed or decrypted only by users that have the encryption key (i.e., a password or passcode). |
Load balancing | Allows users to evenly distribute the network load (incoming network traffic) across a group of backend servers to improve data utilization, facilitate data scalability, and ensure uninterrupted services. |
CDN solutions are relevant to those businesses that have a website or mobile application that caters to a wide audience spread across the world with a large amount of dynamic content; in other words, they are especially useful to large businesses with complex websites.
This doesn’t mean that all businesses require the services of a CDN solution at the same level. However, some organizations benefit from more robust features in a particular area:
Here are the biggest benefits you will see from using content delivery network software in your organization, regardless of your business size or needs:
Choosing which content delivery tool meets your exact content distribution needs can quickly become overwhelming. To narrow the search list, here are some key factors to keep in mind when you evaluate different products:
Note: The applications selected in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations. They have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.