Rackspace Cloud Library

What is a CDN?

A content delivery network (CDN) accelerates the delivery of your website’s pages, video and other content to its visitors. A CDN is often used for retail and ecommerce websites; Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds; and web-based applications that receive a lot of traffic, offer streaming video and interactive media, or have a far-reaching global audience. A CDN uses a system of distributed servers to rapidly deliver web pages and related media to a website visitor based on the geographic locations of the visitor, the origin of the web page and the CDN’s nearest server. Besides quickly delivering content to a visitor, CDNs also help websites cope with unexpected or large surges in traffic.

The operations of a CDN are nearly invisible to your site’s visitors. A visitor will not know if a CDN has delivered a website’s content unless the delivered URL differs from the requested URL.

Fast-loading web pages are of the utmost importance. Per the report, a one-second delay in the response of a web page can cause a 7 percent reduction in your conversions. In business terms, this means that if an ecommerce site has revenues of $100,000 a day, a one-second delay could potentially result in $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

Why Use a CDN?

Faster Content Delivery

The number one reason that ecommerce, retail, media and other businesses use CDNs is site performance. A CDN ensures the rapid-fire delivery of website content with little or no latency. A CDN is especially useful for sites that provide streaming videos, as it reduces or eliminates jitters.

100% Content Availability

Because CDN-empowered websites have their content stored in multiple servers located across different geographic regions, they provide 100 percent content availability, even in the event of network failures, hardware problems and power outages.

Increased Visitor Capacity

A CDN-empowered website can readily handle an unexpected surge in the number of visitors, as the CDN’s distributed network of servers provides a site with additional network carrying capacity.

Improved Website Analytics

CDN providers help their customers by supplying them with additional website analytics, such as the popularity of the site’s content, real-time load statistics, asset viewing details and additional data. With this information, the CDN and customer can fine-tune and improve the control of asset delivery.

How Can Rackspace Help?

Rackspace can help your business with its CDN needs, just as it helps thousands of other CDN-optimized businesses each year around the world. Our CDN advantages include:

High-speed delivery

Our CDN is a global operation, with 200 edge locations around the world, so we can quickly deliver your websites, applications, videos and other content to your visitors regardless of their location.

Stellar performance

As the No. 1 hosting provider for the Internet Retailer Top 1000, we leverage our ecommerce and CDN knowledge to ensure your site’s pages, applications and media-rich content are provided without glitches or latency.

Always-On Support and Expertise

We provide award-winning 24x7x365 support for the Akamai ® network, the CDN industry leader, so your most vital workloads have around-the-clock, immediately responsive tech support.

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