The importance of a CDN with a POP network in New Zealand

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What is a CDN?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is essentially a distributed network of servers that have been strategically positioned around the world with the goal of maximising the speed and efficiency of content delivery. This can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes for content to load, especially for users who are located far from the origin server. CDNs are used by a wide range of websites and applications, including e-commerce sites, social media platforms, and streaming services.

What are the benefits?

  • Improved website performance – This digital infrastructure replicates and stores information such as images, videos, and JavaScript files from an origin server to reduce the latency when  users from different geographical locations that are a distance from the origin server attempt to access your website. Research has proven that slow connectivity drives a loss in customer satisfaction and, ultimately, a loss in revenue per visitor. The role of a CDN means the data has much less distance to travel when requested; therefore, the connectivity will be much quicker and your website will be more responsive.
  • Increased reliability – A CDN improves the reliability of a website by distributing the load across multiple servers. This can help to prevent outages caused by spikes in website traffic or server failures. If a website is hosted on a single server and that server experiences a sudden increase in traffic, it may become overloaded and crash. However, if the website is hosted on a CDN, the load will be distributed across multiple servers, which will help to prevent the website from crashing. Additionally, if one of the servers in a CDN fails, the other servers will continue to serve the website, which will help to prevent outages.
  • Reduced cost – A CDN can help reduce the costs of hosting your website by caching static content and delivering it from servers that are located closer to users. This reduces the amount of bandwidth that your website uses, which ultimately leads to lower hosting costs.
  • Improved security – A CDN will also help to improve the security of your website by providing DDoS protection and SSL encryption. This can help protect your website from malicious attacks.

POP's in NZ

A Point of Presence (POP) is a physical location where two or more networks or communication devices share a connection. These POP’s are where CDN’s store a cached version of their content and are used by a variety of network service providers, including internet service providers, telecommunications companies, and content delivery networks. There are only a handful of CDN providers that have POP’s in New Zealand. We recommend using either Cloudflare or Fastly as a CDN provider; both providers are reliable. We do NOT recommend using any other CDN provider. 

Difference between a POP and a Data Centre

A POP, or point of presence, is a physical location where telecommunications networks connect to each other. A data centre, on the other hand, is a facility that houses computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. POP’s are used to provide local access to network services from around the world, while data centres are used to store and process data.

Closing Thoughts

To summarize, having a CDN with a POP in New Zealand is important because it can:

  • Improve website performance by reducing latency and speeding up page load times.
  • Increase reliability by providing a more robust infrastructure for serving content.
  • Reduce costs by caching content closer to users, which can reduce the amount of bandwidth required to deliver content.
  • Improve security by providing a more secure infrastructure for serving content.
  • Help to reduce latency and improve the user experience for New Zealand users.

Ultimately, a CDN having a POP in New Zealand will provide a number of benefits for businesses and organisations that want to improve the performance, reliability, costs, security, and user experience of their websites and applications.

If you would like to learn more about a CDN, get in touch with Anel today.

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