What is a CDN? – Content Delivery Network Explained – AWS

Content delivery networks (CDNs) provide many benefits that improve website performance and support core network infrastructure. For example, a CDN can do the following tasks:

Reduce page load time

Website traffic can decrease if your page load times are too slow. A CDN can reduce bounce rates and increase the time users spend on your site.

Reduce bandwidth costs

Bandwidth costs are a significant expense because every incoming website request consumes network bandwidth. Through caching and other optimizations, CDNs can reduce the amount of data an origin server must provide, reducing the costs of hosting for website owners.

Increase content availability

Too many visitors at one time or network hardware failures can cause a website to crash. CDN services can handle more web traffic and reduce the load on web servers. Also, if one or more CDN servers go offline, other operational servers can replace them to ensure uninterrupted service.

Improve website security

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks attempt to take down applications by sending large amounts of fake traffic to the website. CDNs can handle such traffic spikes by distributing the load between several intermediary servers, reducing the impact on the origin server.