By Amit Singh, Managing Director, Zenlayer India
The year 2020 has brought in the much-witnessed rise and fall in the world-wide economy due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While people across the globe stayed at home in isolation, many aspects of their life -school, work, and entertainment completely shifted online. Since March 2020, consumer and business content consumption has been expanding mainly in sectors of – education (online classes), business (virtual meetings), e-commerce (online shopping), social media, gaming online, online news, and entertainment. Hence, this caused an unexpected surge of about 50-70% in internet traffic, making the role of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) more prominent. The rapid and abrupt rise in internet consumption called for the services of CDNs for delivering internet content to the end-users more swiftly and securely.
The linkage between CDN and Data Consumption
Providing a fast web browsing experience to site visitors is significant in today’s digital era. Visitors are less likely to purchase or engage with the site if the user experience is unsatisfactory. And CDNs contribute significantly to this internet business strategy. Content providers such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators for delivering their content to their end-users. Consecutively, a CDN pays ISPs, carriers, and network operators for hosting servers in their data centers.
CDNs deliver more than half of the global internet traffic. And with the rise of internet data utilization in 2020, CDNs are now in huge demand more than ever. They facilitate to make your website popular and let you stay ahead in this excessively competitive digital era. Enterprises today use CDNs for improvising their website performances. Most enterprises serve global audiences and thus require a quicker delivery of their content. Smaller businesses often don’t realize how much a CDN can benefit them. CDNs assist in boosting the delivery speed and scalability of your website and enhance the user experience by keeping visitors engaged and increasing the probabilities of their return visits.
Let’s understand more about how CDNs handle the quick delivery of increasing data consumption. We know that a CDN refers to a group of strategically placed servers across the globe intending to boost the speed of delivery of static web content. Usually, 80% of a website contains static resources, and with a CDN, there is a much lesser load on the origin server to deliver the content. Depending upon the origin server location, CDNs aid in providing fast internet connection all over the world by storing cached versions of the web content in multiple locations.
Factors driving the market growth include:
> Increasing volume of content sharing over internet
> Easy accessibility of high-speed internet connection
> Increasing demand for Over the Top (OTT) and Video-on-Demand (VOD) services
> Easy availability of mobile network and broadband services
> Significant reduction in data tariffs
> High usage of multiple smart devices
CDN performance factors best business advantages such as:
• Faster performance and lower latency: A CDN can dramatically increase speeds over long distances for global audiences by connecting to the server nearest to the user’s location, which significantly reduces the cost of TCP and TLS handshake.
• Offloading the origin server: Traditional web hosts are no longer able to meet the demands of websites. CDN can take the load off from your origin server by dividing the load across a global network of POPs with more than a thousand servers, unlike the case of a web host where the complete burden is on one server.
• Enhanced SEO performance: With Search engine optimization (SEO), fast loading websites have a better chance of moving up in SERPs. CDN enhances your website pages to load faster and increases the frequency with which Google searches images and pages.
• Cost-effective: With advanced CDN features of Origin Shield and hotlink protection, bandwidth can be decreased, thus reducing the total cost of bandwidth.
• Reliability: CDN ensures lesser chances of website downtime. With a CDN, requests to your website route to the nearest available POP. If one appears to be down, it passes the request onto the next one.
• Scalability: In cases of web traffic spikes, most web hosts may crash under heavy loads, but a CDN can help avoid that. Since most content on a website is usually static, it is cached on the edge servers, thus taking off a large share of the load from the origin server, allowing your website to be more scalable.
• Improved security: Advanced CDN security features include SSL, DDoS and Secure Token. Enabling these ensures that there is complete data encryption between the CDN edge servers and the origin server.
• Easy deployments: CDNs can be easily integrated and quickly deployed on almost any platform.
• Better conversion rates and sales: CDN can enhance the performance of a website by boosting its speed. Better user experience can lead to more conversions.
Being online is now a norm, and social media has become a part of our daily lives due to the convenience of high-speed internet. Even the sizes of the web pages have increased rapidly. As per the data in the HTTP Archive, the average web page size in 2010 was 702 kB compared to 2,409 kB in 2016, and it has been constantly growing. With the growing sizes of web components and videos, webpage size has rapidly increased by 1,707 kB or 243% from 2010 to 2016. Websites often face slow loading times due to this rapid growth of web page sizes. And we are sure that a CDN can help tackle this increase and further enhance the digital journey on internet users across the globe.