Providing users with great, engaging content is no longer enough to build a robust service and win loyal users. In an increasingly crowded market, a fast and seamless viewing and download experience is gaining importance as a key distinguishing factor in helping your brand get ahead of the competition. Find out how a CDN can help your organisation improve loading times, reduce bandwidth costs, and increase global availability.

In recent years, advances in digital technology have led businesses to seek more effective methods of delivering content. The increased presence of the internet in daily life has allowed more consumers to do their shopping and secure services online. Furthermore, the improvement in internet speeds has made it possible for more complex websites with rich media to become the norm. To add to this, the expectations of consumers have risen as they expect to be able to access services immediately and with little to no delay.

This has resulted in the rise of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). CDNs are networks of geographically distributed servers that enable content distribution to users faster.

Read more: Content market in southeast Asia & why CDN is important.

As businesses strive to meet the demands of ever-growing global audiences, an increasing number are turning to CDNs to ensure quick and seamless content delivery. This is because CDNs provide many benefits, many of which are direct results of how CDNs operate. Some benefits even arise as a consequence of others.

Decrease Server Load

Recall that a CDN is a network of servers located in different geographical areas that are used to deliver content. This content is not stored on one central server but is instead spread out across Point of Presence. This prevents any one server from becoming overloaded, which improves the CDN's overall capacity utilisation, reduces the usage of upstream bandwidth and delivery costs, and improves performance for concurrent users.

Improve Website Speed and Performance

Businesses that rely on their website's content delivery speed can benefit immensely from CDNs. Any significant delay in page load times can result in users bouncing off the web page, exiting the site, or even moving to a competitor's website.

Businesses can improve website content performance for end-users by using CDNs. CDNs do this by caching content on servers closest to the end-users. The cached content can include HTML code, image files, live video feeds, and JavaScript.

This means that when an end-user requests a page or content on the website, the request does not have to go to the origin server. The end-user can access the web content from the servers nearest to them, which minimises the delay and improves web performance.

Allow Audience Segmentation Based on User Analytics

One potential benefit of CDNs that is often overlooked is their ability to provide valuable insights into the audience. CDNs today handle a significant amount of the world's internet traffic, collecting vast amounts of data on users, including their internet connectivity, device usage, and more. This data can be translated into helpful analytics, which can be used in decision-making.

Analysing user data, such as real-time load statistics, capacity per customer, most active areas, and the popularity of different content assets, can help businesses understand trends and content consumption patterns. This information can be used to optimise the website, improve the user experience, and contribute to more sales and conversions.

Reduce Packet Loss and Lower Network Latency

When transmitting information across devices over the internet, such as from a website to an end-user, it is done through packets. These packets are small units of data that contain information about the network addresses of the source and destination, error detection and correction rules, protocol identifiers and more, along with the application or website data.

Suppose packets must travel long distances and pass through many devices before reaching the end-user. In that case, some packets may be lost or delayed, reducing the user experience quality. This is especially problematic for high-definition video, audio, or live streaming content, which can experience issues such as out-of-sync audio, display distortions, and choppy audio. All these issues can be overcome with CDN solutions.

Enable Advanced Website Security

One of the indirect benefits of CDN services is that they improve website security. By distributing content across their edge servers, CDNs can help avoid web server overloads. This also makes it more difficult for cyber attacks that rely on sending traffic spikes to key servers.

Attackers often target DNS servers in DDoS attacks, where a large volume of requests are sent in an attempt to overwhelm the server and bring down the website. This can cause economic losses and reputation damage and lead to other more severe hacks and attacks. CDNs can help to shield DDoS attacks by distributing the load evenly across the entire capacity of the network and protecting data centres.

Enhance Content Availability

As the internet increasingly becomes media-rich, businesses must ensure their website content is highly available to meet consumer demands. With high traffic comes the pressure to prevent websites from crashing and maintain content availability.

CDNs can absorb traffic and distribute it across the infrastructure, thereby increasing content availability regardless of load. Using a CDN with multiple Points of Presence (PoPs) ensures that your traffic will be uninterrupted even if one server goes down. The top-tier CDNs additionally have load balancing functionality, which allows them to automatically sense availability and redirect users and requests accordingly. This provides 100% uptime for your users.

Contribute to Cost Savings by Reducing Bandwidth

CDNs also help reduce costs by optimising the bandwidth used by a business. If the volume of requests to a website is constantly high, this can consume correspondingly high bandwidth, driving up costs. CDNs help reduce the bandwidth demands on origin servers, reducing bandwidth and web hosting costs for website owners.

A CDN provider can help businesses save on the costs associated with setting up infrastructure, hosting and servers across the globe. With a CDN, businesses only need to pay according to the traffic and amount of requests. Some CDN providers offer self-service and optimisation features that give businesses more granular control over costs and performance.

Increase Audience Reach and Scale Effectively

CDNs allow businesses to reach a larger global audience by making it easier and more affordable to deliver content to users in distant geographic locations. They also help to ensure a consistent user experience, which is essential for customer satisfaction. Happy customers tend to stick around, leading to a snowball effect that accelerates audience expansion and allows businesses to scale into new markets effectively.

TM CDN

With over 90 nodes worldwide and a deep in-country presence in ASEAN, TM CDN offers a variety of built-in features to solve your most pressing delivery challenges, including content protection and asset optimisation. Meanwhile, robust customisation tools and components let you fine-tune your delivery's most minor details and even create unique functionality and flows.

TM WHOLESALE communication services and solutions offer a reliable and secure connection that can help improve traffic control on your local or wide-area networks. You can also use our suite of services to improve application performance and availability or protect your data from disaster. You can choose the option that best meets your needs with a range of services that include advanced IP with Quality of Service routing, to the flexibility of Ethernet, and data networking services.

For more information on how a CDN could enhance your business, take a look at TM CDN solutions and our integrated telco services portfolio. Get in touch today for a pricing breakdown and free consultation with a TM CDN specialist.