Content delivery networks have become populous among online video services, e-commerce retailers, global corporations, and social media firms. Even though this technology is beneficial to huge companies, it is still necessary to your small business and can still give your project a milestone in the online arena. If the audience you are targeting is spread across various geographical locations, CDN will help accelerate the distribution and delivery of content; thus improving the experience of users. The benefit is evident when you are using a network that covers the whole globe. However, it is necessary to note that sites which have visitors from one geographical location will not work faster with CDN as it will decrease its delivery speed.
The search for the right CDN can be tricky and arduous. When you are making a choice, you need to, first of all, determine peculiarities and requirements of your site including the volume of traffic, the target audience, and the necessary security features. You may then search for the right company by analyzing its services. Below are some of the aspects you need to put into account;
Payment options
There are two primary payment methods for CDN services; the pipeline pricing and per-gigabyte.
Per-gigabyte; – in this case, you pay for the gigabytes of the traffic used.
Pipeline pricing; – you pre-pay for the package of gigabytes in a package. You will pay for another plan if you exceed the limit of your package.
It is not easy to ascertain which payment option is better because it depends on the website. In case your site has a lot of unpredictable traffic, selecting the per-gigabyte pricing is better, while pipeline pricing is perfect for sites with predictable and even flow.
Support services
It is important to have friendly and experienced technical staff giving you help. Before using an individual network, you need to ensure that you get an all-time service, and the agents solve issues quickly. You need to choose a service provider that has various communication means like e-mail, social media, tickets, and phone. A company that uses these methods to communicate with its audience is the best for your business. You need to contact support services to get some information before making an order. You also need to get information on the available CDN solutions and find an optimal configuration for your business. Doing some background search on the services of a company will help you with CDN compare to evaluate knowledge, friendliness, and competence of the agents. A decent provider needs to satisfy all his clients.
Performance
Many firms allow you to check their CDN before placing an order. You can check these services in several ways. First of all, you might access a free trial version that will take almost two months to ascertain how the network improves your speed. Other companies would allow you to run CDN using demos or pages of your site. It is nice to spend time testing different CDN solutions. You will have to write notes on the difference of the website’s performance before and after implementing the service. The content delivery network is an opportunity to enhance user experience and site speed without using a lot of money.
Advantages of CDN
Your sites will experience fast loading speed making the distance between the user and the server short. You will also experience a better quality of content for videos and images thus reducing the physical distance between the receiver and the source. CDN also serves as an additional level of security by providing a firewall. It identifies threats and eliminates them before reaching the origin server. You will have SEO benefits as your sites will load faster and achieve better ranks on Google search engines.
