Content Delivery Networks and SiteGround CDN (Webinar FAQ + Video)
Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2024 7:06 am
Your website speed is a crucial part of your online success. To help you further optimize your website loading time, we recently launched our own SiteGround CDN for our customers . Since many of you were curious about this in-house solution, we hosted a live webinar (in English) with our Product and Technology Lead to answer the most common questions about our latest speed-boosting CDN service, available for free with each of our hosting plans in its Basic version and as a paid upgrade in its Premium version. Here are the answers to the most frequently asked questions from our webinar audience, as well as those we didn’t have time to answer during the online session.
What is a CDN?
Every website lives on a server somewhere in the world. For example, SiteGround offers several data center locations in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia, which you can choose from when purchasing our web hosting services. When your website visitors open your site, they connect to the server that hosts your website. The closer your visitors are to your host server, the faster your website will load and the better their user experience will be. However, the purpose of a website is to be accessible and fast from any point in the world, 24/7/365. For this purpose, a CDN exists.
What does CDN stand for? It is a content delivery network that caches parts of your website or the entire website and distributes it on servers that are closest to your visitors. Basically, it keeps copies of your website in many locations around the world. So, if you have a CDN active, every time a user visits your site, it will be loaded from a location that is closest to them instead of loading from the origin server. As a result, a CDN service greatly reduces page load times and speeds up your website.
What are the benefits of using a CDN for your website?
Websites with international visitors
If your website has a lot of international traffic, it will be well distributed across different CDN locations. For example, when we launched our SiteGround CDN in locations where we didn’t have data centers, the response time for end users improved dramatically – by 6-8x for some websites, and even 10x for others. SiteGround currently has 14 CDN locations around the world (including the newest CDN location in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as well as our new data center and CDN location in Madrid, Spain ) that optimize website performance for international visitors.
Websites with users in remote areas
In many places around the world, people do not have access to fast internet. Therefore, a CDN is very beneficial for users in remote areas, where the internet connection is not that good. When they want to load a website, they will connect to a server that is closer to their location and thus the website will load faster.
Websites that change content frequently
A CDN caches your website content on a server close to your site visitors and delivers this cached version to them every time they visit your site. Therefore, the period for which you want the CDN to keep the cache of your files is important. If you set your CDN to keep cached copies for too long, say a month, but you make changes to your site frequently within this time frame, then they will not go live until you clear the cache manually. Similarly, if you set the cache time to be too short, then it will not work as it should, because the main idea is to store a cached version for a particular period of time. Therefore, it is good to choose a time period that suits your site depending on how frequently you intend to make changes to it. For example, SiteGround CDN’s cache life time is set to 12 hours by default, and you can easily customize the cache life time to your own needs in the Premium version.
You should also consider your website’s software application. For example, for WordPress websites, we have the SiteGround Optimizer plugin that connects to WordPress in such a way that when you make changes to your site (e.g. change a post or theme, install a plugin, etc.), the plugin detects these changes in real-time, connects to our CDN, and flushes the cache only for the respective pages that have been changed. This is very helpful! For any other type of CMS/application you may use on your site, we honor your application’s standard cache headers. If your application allows you to set a certain amount of time to cache your pages and resources, then our CDN will honor that time .
CDN benefits for websites without international traffic
Even websites without international traffic will benefit from using a CDN. For example, if your business is in the US, you might have website visitors from the East Coast, West Coast, and Central States. If you have a US-based website, it will be hosted in our data center in Iowa. In this case, a visitor from New York, for example, will have to wait a bit longer compared to other users, if you don't have a CDN enabled. Activating our CDN service that offers multiple CDN locations in the US will make your website load much faster for all US users. Similar situations apply to almost all other continents in the world.
How does SiteGround CDN compare to third-party services?
Compared to a third-party provider, SiteGround CDN offers many benefits for your website, because it is a service built around three main pillars:
Easy to use
Let's say you're using a third-party CDN provider that isn't integrated with your hosting provider's services. Then you'll need to manage the hosting from one place and configure the CDN from another place, which can often cause issues. Also, you'll have to apply different settings on your own, depending on the CDN provider you use. For example, in certain cases, when you enable a specific CDN provider, you need to reconfigure all your images to load from specific URLs, so that those images are loaded from the CDN.
Therefore, we have built our SiteGround CDN in a way that it doesn’t need much configuration to be enabled. In fact, you just click a button and it starts working. Plus, it’s super easy to use. We have provided you with the default values and thereafter, you can change some of the things as per your website’s needs with just a few clicks. Our CDN allows you to enable it without any technical knowledge as well as use and change its functionalities seamlessly, with just a click of a button.
Incredibly fast
Another benefit of our CDN is that it makes your website load incredibly fast korea whatsapp number data because it is based on the same cloud network that our hosting services are based on: the Google Cloud network. Also, by using this network, data travels securely through it. Using the same private network allows us to improve website performance and deliver fast loading speeds.
Built in-house
Safety net for trouble
Typically, many website owners use a CDN service. If something goes wrong with this service, their entire website and/or business depends on it. Therefore, we feel it is important that we have full control over any potential issues that may arise and therefore we have built our SiteGround CDN in-house. Since it is an in-house built product, our support team will be able to troubleshoot a potential issue as it is a core service we offer.
Room for expansion
There is always room for improvement and when the time comes for a new feature or our customers require new functionality, we will be able to add them as we have built the service ourselves and know its technical specifications. We will consider and evaluate feature requests based on the business case and the type of feature. Also, we will be able to do it in a timely manner as we have built the entire CDN over a year and a half (including the research phase). This gives us the confidence that we can scale the service as much as we want.
What is a CDN?
Every website lives on a server somewhere in the world. For example, SiteGround offers several data center locations in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia, which you can choose from when purchasing our web hosting services. When your website visitors open your site, they connect to the server that hosts your website. The closer your visitors are to your host server, the faster your website will load and the better their user experience will be. However, the purpose of a website is to be accessible and fast from any point in the world, 24/7/365. For this purpose, a CDN exists.
What does CDN stand for? It is a content delivery network that caches parts of your website or the entire website and distributes it on servers that are closest to your visitors. Basically, it keeps copies of your website in many locations around the world. So, if you have a CDN active, every time a user visits your site, it will be loaded from a location that is closest to them instead of loading from the origin server. As a result, a CDN service greatly reduces page load times and speeds up your website.
What are the benefits of using a CDN for your website?
Websites with international visitors
If your website has a lot of international traffic, it will be well distributed across different CDN locations. For example, when we launched our SiteGround CDN in locations where we didn’t have data centers, the response time for end users improved dramatically – by 6-8x for some websites, and even 10x for others. SiteGround currently has 14 CDN locations around the world (including the newest CDN location in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as well as our new data center and CDN location in Madrid, Spain ) that optimize website performance for international visitors.
Websites with users in remote areas
In many places around the world, people do not have access to fast internet. Therefore, a CDN is very beneficial for users in remote areas, where the internet connection is not that good. When they want to load a website, they will connect to a server that is closer to their location and thus the website will load faster.
Websites that change content frequently
A CDN caches your website content on a server close to your site visitors and delivers this cached version to them every time they visit your site. Therefore, the period for which you want the CDN to keep the cache of your files is important. If you set your CDN to keep cached copies for too long, say a month, but you make changes to your site frequently within this time frame, then they will not go live until you clear the cache manually. Similarly, if you set the cache time to be too short, then it will not work as it should, because the main idea is to store a cached version for a particular period of time. Therefore, it is good to choose a time period that suits your site depending on how frequently you intend to make changes to it. For example, SiteGround CDN’s cache life time is set to 12 hours by default, and you can easily customize the cache life time to your own needs in the Premium version.
You should also consider your website’s software application. For example, for WordPress websites, we have the SiteGround Optimizer plugin that connects to WordPress in such a way that when you make changes to your site (e.g. change a post or theme, install a plugin, etc.), the plugin detects these changes in real-time, connects to our CDN, and flushes the cache only for the respective pages that have been changed. This is very helpful! For any other type of CMS/application you may use on your site, we honor your application’s standard cache headers. If your application allows you to set a certain amount of time to cache your pages and resources, then our CDN will honor that time .
CDN benefits for websites without international traffic
Even websites without international traffic will benefit from using a CDN. For example, if your business is in the US, you might have website visitors from the East Coast, West Coast, and Central States. If you have a US-based website, it will be hosted in our data center in Iowa. In this case, a visitor from New York, for example, will have to wait a bit longer compared to other users, if you don't have a CDN enabled. Activating our CDN service that offers multiple CDN locations in the US will make your website load much faster for all US users. Similar situations apply to almost all other continents in the world.
How does SiteGround CDN compare to third-party services?
Compared to a third-party provider, SiteGround CDN offers many benefits for your website, because it is a service built around three main pillars:
Easy to use
Let's say you're using a third-party CDN provider that isn't integrated with your hosting provider's services. Then you'll need to manage the hosting from one place and configure the CDN from another place, which can often cause issues. Also, you'll have to apply different settings on your own, depending on the CDN provider you use. For example, in certain cases, when you enable a specific CDN provider, you need to reconfigure all your images to load from specific URLs, so that those images are loaded from the CDN.
Therefore, we have built our SiteGround CDN in a way that it doesn’t need much configuration to be enabled. In fact, you just click a button and it starts working. Plus, it’s super easy to use. We have provided you with the default values and thereafter, you can change some of the things as per your website’s needs with just a few clicks. Our CDN allows you to enable it without any technical knowledge as well as use and change its functionalities seamlessly, with just a click of a button.
Incredibly fast
Another benefit of our CDN is that it makes your website load incredibly fast korea whatsapp number data because it is based on the same cloud network that our hosting services are based on: the Google Cloud network. Also, by using this network, data travels securely through it. Using the same private network allows us to improve website performance and deliver fast loading speeds.
Built in-house
Safety net for trouble
Typically, many website owners use a CDN service. If something goes wrong with this service, their entire website and/or business depends on it. Therefore, we feel it is important that we have full control over any potential issues that may arise and therefore we have built our SiteGround CDN in-house. Since it is an in-house built product, our support team will be able to troubleshoot a potential issue as it is a core service we offer.
Room for expansion
There is always room for improvement and when the time comes for a new feature or our customers require new functionality, we will be able to add them as we have built the service ourselves and know its technical specifications. We will consider and evaluate feature requests based on the business case and the type of feature. Also, we will be able to do it in a timely manner as we have built the entire CDN over a year and a half (including the research phase). This gives us the confidence that we can scale the service as much as we want.