what's a CDN network?

Is your website concerned?

Why you should use a CDN network?

CDN is a Content Delivery Network (CDN or Content Delivery Network) which is a set of servers distributed in several countries or several regions and networked via the Internet to accelerate the distribution of your site.

CONTEXT

  • Every day thousands/millions of websites are published.
  • The traffic increases more than proportionally, which gradually saturates the bandwidths.
  • Networks (fiber optics) are also in constant development, cables cross the oceans and the entire planet is almost connected.

EXCEPT THAT :

  • The servers on which the sites are located are geographically located in fixed places and often very distant from most users.
  • Visitors who connect to your site are potentially located anywhere on the planet and therefore remote from the server hosting your site.
  • The requests will be more or less long if your visitors are located in Europe, Oceania, the United States, Africa or Australia because there is always a more or less long geographical route to transfer your data.

 

cdn-illus-1

GEOGRAPHICAL reality

All the data on your mauritian site (especially photos but HTML pages, javascript files, CSS, fonts, etc.) must therefore pass - in this case for a visitor located in Sydney - through a bunch of intermediate servers ( from Roubaix in France > a German city > an Italian server > a Turkish server > via Mumbai in India > then Singapore > Darwin in Australia and finally Sydney). But even at the speed of light, transmitting several MB of data via optical fiber over a distance of 17,000 km takes time.

 

 

Even at the speed of light, transmitting several MB of data via optical fiber over a distance of 10,000 km takes time.

 

 

With the result that the page of a site which is displayed in one or two seconds in Europe (if the server is located in France as is the case for OVH) the same site will take between 6, 10 or 20 seconds to appear in Indonesia or the United States. And this regardless of the visitor's connection speed. In our case - in Mauritius - it takes up to 25 seconds or sometimes more to display a page that renders in less than 3 seconds in Europe. Despite a pro connection, the optical fiber of 100 MBps in download and 50 MBps in upload.

COMFORT and SEO referencing

Not only does this slowness constitute a potential obstacle for visitors to your site (difficulty waiting for the pages to be displayed) but it also strongly penalizes the referencing which is made from the regions in which a Google request concerning your activity occurs. . Google prioritizes sites that have fast load times.

Concretely: The same request on your sector of activity will show your site higher in the results in Europe (if your server is located in Europe) than the same request made from another continent. And this, even if the request is identical and concerning the same city. Example: "best hotel in Mauritius". SEO results will be different in Singapore, Brussels or Los Angeles just because of the differences in the display time of your site in those specific locations.

 

cdn-illus-2

The CDN Solution

By using such a network, your server connects to a multitude of other servers. The CDN network consists of duplicating a large part of the content of your site, the most bandwidth-intensive part (mainly images, films, HTML pages, javascript files, CSS, fonts, etc.) on servers spread over the planet so that it is always "local" servers that display your data. Be careful, when we talk about local servers, at the Internet level, we are talking about 1000 km sections. Servers located in Brussels, London, Milan, Madrid or Berlin are considered local in relation to Mauritius. We are talking here about websites with an international scope. For E-commerce or international hotel or restaurant sites.

 

 

The CDN solution is especially useful for websites with an international reach.

 

 

The result (here from Mauritius) is stunning. The test we did practically divides by 15 or 20 the display time of a page of galleries (on-line sale of dresses in Mauritius and Reunion). Our dedicated servers being geographically in France (OVH) the gallery page display time varied between 20 and 40 seconds and my client's customers complained about the slowness of certain pages or even the impossibility of buying because of these delays.

It was first thought that these were people with too weak a connection. But even at 100 Mbps, the display was painful. With the CDN solution, the display has become immediate. And again, on our island, the nearest CDN server is in Singapore. Or 5,500 km from the island. But on a less congested route (cables in the Indian Ocean) than the 10,000 km that separate us from Roubaix in France.

In summary :

A web server is geographically located:
If your site is visited by a person living 8,000 km from the place where your server is hosted, the data to be transferred will take some time to reach this distant visitor.

The CDN service multiplies and delocalizes your data:
Thanks to around thirty servers spread around the world, your data will be transferred much faster to the browsers of visitors to your site.

Natural referencing help:
Google favors sites that display quickly, you will be better referenced naturally than a competitor whose page would take 7 or 8 seconds to display.

our rates

Prices vary depending on the bandwidth used by your site. This being a third-party service, it is for us here to optimize the effectiveness of the sites that we have created for our customers. Not to make a profit. The amount for this service is in addition to your accommodation with us. Because your site remains hosted mainly on our servers. Only images, typos, animations, etc. are duplicated to the 40 CDN servers spread across the planet.

In addition to the third-party costs, there are the costs to modify the source code of your current site, ie to change all the links of the images (among others) so that they point to the CDN services.

An idea of prices