What is a CDN?

Available to: Both Ecommerce & WordPress Clients

What is a CDN?

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large fraction of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks.

Content providers such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their audience of end-users. In turn, a CDN pays ISPs, carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers. Besides better performance and availability, CDNs also offload the traffic served directly from the content provider’s origin infrastructure, resulting in possible cost savings for the content provider. In addition, CDNs provide the content provider a degree of protection from DoS attacks by using their large distributed server infrastructure to absorb the attack traffic.

So what does this mean and do I need it?

It means your site will run faster and an added layer of security will help defer DoS attacks.
While it’s not necessary it is something you should consider, most seriously if your business relies on your website. While our WebAuthorings servers are fast and safe, adding a CDN makes your site quicker and safer.