CDN

A CDN (content delivery network) is a globally distributed network of servers that stores cached copies of your website and serves each visitor from the location physically closest to them. Instead of every request travelling back to your origin server, the CDN delivers content from a nearby edge location, which makes pages load faster, takes load off your origin, lowers bandwidth costs, and adds reliability and security including DDoS protection. Almost every high-traffic website uses one. Free CDNs (Cloudflare) and pay-as-you-go options (Bunny) cover most needs; enterprise CDNs (Fastly, Akamai, AWS CloudFront) handle the largest workloads.

How it works

Your website lives on an origin server. A CDN keeps cached copies of your static content (images, CSS, JavaScript, fonts, and often whole pages) on hundreds of servers worldwide, called points of presence or PoPs. When someone visits, the request is routed to the nearest PoP. If the content is cached there it is served instantly; if not, the edge fetches it once from the origin, caches it, and serves every subsequent local request directly.

Why it matters

A CDN cuts page load times for global visitors, absorbs traffic spikes that would otherwise hit your server, reduces origin bandwidth costs, improves uptime when the origin briefly fails, and adds a security layer that filters attack traffic before it reaches you. For any site with audience in more than one region, it is the single highest-impact performance and reliability upgrade available.

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Frequently Asked Questions