A company’s website is often the first impression a new customer or user has of the brand. The digital age is going strong. As such, people are more likely to search a company’s website for information over calling them or visiting a store location in person. It also has a broader reach than physical stores, so your website’s performance must be at its best. The multi-CDN strategy is one of the most effective ways to ensure your website performance is excellent. Join us as we look at how to use multi-CDN and why it’s an effective strategy.
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What’s CDN?
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. We know it might sound like a mouthful, but promise the basics behind it is much simpler than you imagine. This network is a group of servers located in various geographically distributed data centers.
The purpose of these servers is to reduce the latency, which means bringing the content closer to your website. As such, when users access content, like images, videos, and product lists, they can do so faster and without long loading times.
The servers will store the content in its cache, giving users direct access. If it doesn’t have the information in its supply, it’ll facilitate the retrieval of the content from the original server and then store it in its cache.
CDN vs. Multi-CDN
It might sound obvious, but a multi-CDN strategy is just using multiple CDNs for the same purpose as using one. You’re employing various CDN providers to complete your network. This approach ensures there’s almost no downtime on your servers and lowers the cost.
Yes, you heard that right: using a multi-CDN strategy can actually cost you less than using one provider. The reason for the lower cost of service is that CDN providers have variable pricing based on server location. It means they operate in different parts of the world. You get the lowest possible prices when you manage your networks. You set it to use particular CDNs in jurisdictions and times when they offer low prices.
Multi-CDN Strategy’s Benefits
This approach also has other benefits besides the lower cost we discussed above.
Increased Geographical Coverage
Content Delivery Networks are available globally. Still, these servers often have jurisdictions where they work more effectively. Conversely, they have some locations where they experience decreased effectiveness. Sudden latency spikes are another problem to worry about. These spikes can negatively impact a single provider, causing them to experience downtime.
By using more than one provider, you won’t need to worry about latency spikes or subpar performance. Your network of multiple networks will ensure that your server continually operates at its best in any location worldwide. You can also easily switch from one provider to another if latency spikes or other issues affect their servers.
Multiple Specialized Features
Like most tools, these providers hone their tools to be the best in a specific category. These categories can be enhanced video streaming, improved security, or optimizing static content. When you’re using a single provider, your website will have to cater to its specialty to experience the best performance.
However, with multiple providers, you have to make use of many specialties. Your website can offer video streaming with zero lag, optimized static content on all devices, and excellent security. With different providers, there’s no need to skimp on what matters to your company.
Better Availability and Security
CDN providers’ commercial networks can handle much larger quantities of online traffic. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s infallible. Unlimited capacity is still a dream, and you might find that significant peaks in online traffic overwhelm your provider. That’s not even to speak of what would happen if a regional or national outage occurs.
Using many providers means if one is down, you can use another. You can distribute your traffic to servers that aren’t overwhelmed. Further, your content and website are safer as it’s linked with multiple providers. As such, an online attack on a single provider is unlikely to affect you.
How Multi CDN Improves Website Performance
We’ve discussed some of the benefits, and we’re sure you can see their uses for your website’s performance. But let’s dive into more concrete ways this strategy improves website performance.
Quicker Load Speed
When customers use your website, any information they access needs to travel from your original server to where they’re accessing it from. So if your server is in the US, but they access it from the UK or Indonesia, then it has a significant physical distance it needs to travel. This is latency and is why customers experience long loading screens when using your website.
However, this network adds a server in the country they’re accessing your website from. Now, instead of the content traveling from the US to Indonesia, the Indonesian server already has the information in its cache. Thus, the online traffic stays within the country, eliminating loading times.
Increases Your Traffic Limit
Standard servers, like the ones businesses and websites often use, generally have a limit on how much traffic they can handle. It’s frustrating if your business gets increasing interest only for the performance to decrease as your server can’t handle the traffic.
However, the commercial servers of CDNs reduced website downtime as they can handle more traffic. It means your servers are less likely to become overwhelmed. You can grow your business without your website being unable to keep up with the demand.
Blocks Malicious Traffic
As a business grows, the chances increase for cyber criminals to use malicious bots and traffic to target your brand. It can mean that your website operates less efficiently and can even block authentic leads from becoming customers.
Security is a significant part of most CDNs. Built-in mechanisms such as Bot Control, Backdoor Protection, Web-Application Firewall, and other options are available. These tools filter and manage your traffic. It detects bots and prevents hacking attempts. It also ensures that no global servers create a backdoor to your original server.
Stabilizes a Site During DDoS Attacks
DDoS attacks are one of the most common ways hackers can sabotage your website. By overloading your server with bot traffic and so on, it ensures your website goes down, which can mean a significant loss in revenue. It also makes you lose credibility with existing customers, as people are more likely to dismiss a brand where the website is constantly under attack or experiencing downtime.
However, CDNs can recognize DDoS attacks and distribute the traffic to various servers. It ensures your server doesn’t go down and successfully foils the attack. In this way, customers never even know there was an attack, and your servers remain operational with no loss in revenue.
Effective PoP Performance
We’ve touched on this before, but latency has a massive impact on your website’s performance. It can determine whether your customers experience loading times and how quickly they can access your content. As such, having increased latency will lower the performance of your website and can often frustrate customers to the point that they’d instead leave your website.
Like you manage your CDNs to get the lowest possible cost, you can also analyze and efficiently direct web traffic to ensure the best performance possible. Knowing what type of traffic to expect means you can analyze it with your competitors, but it also means you can manage your network to experience decreased latency. You direct traffic to the CDN with the best latency and ensure your website outperforms competitors.
Using Multi-CDN to Your Advantage
A quality website is crucial to impressing customers and building a loyal customer base. While a user-friendly interface and engaging content are vital, the website’s performance can make or break it. We’ve touched upon the best reasons to use a multi-CDN strategy, so your website performs the best it can. If you’re looking for faster loading speeds, security against cyber attacks, and PoP management, then look no further, as this is the ideal solution.