5.02 - CDN

1 - Findings & Impacts

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) allows your visitors to load the static content of your site's pages (images, JavaScript files and hidden CSS) from a server located as close as possible from their place of connection. The CDN allows to have the contents of your site delivered from as many servers as possible around the planet. It is important to avoid confusion and make a clear difference between server-side caching with browser-side caching (see: browser caching).

2 - Recommendations

For example, you can use Amazon Cloudfront or CloudFlare to cache pages from your site and distribute them from their other servers around the world. They also protect your site by filtering incoming traffic, preventing DDoS attacks, switching to HTTP2, keeping your site online even when your hosting has dropped, and much more.

Examples of free CDNs (which offer a more advanced version with a paid subscription):

• CloudFlare
• OVH
• Coral Content Distribution Network
• CoBlitz (a CoDeeN subproject)
• Google AJAX Libraires API (makes several popular JavaScript libraries available)
• Microsoft AJAX CDN (provides jQuery and AJAX scripts from ASP.NET)

Example of a paid subscriptions for CDN:

• Akamai Technologies
• Amazon CloudFront
• AT & T
• Fasterize
• CacheFly
• EWAY Telecom
• Hexaglobe
• Streamedia
• Highwinds Network Group
• Limelight Networks
• SimpleCDN