Prevent Online Traffic Jams with a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Original source: Limelight Networks

Many industries have been impacted by COVID, some in positive ways such as, online shopping and streaming video. Many experts predict this will continue post-pandemic, leading to a continued traffic surge on streaming and eCommerce services. The challenge is preventing outages when online business is booming.

Research from Google shows that “as page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.” In short, increases in response time are enough to cancel out increases in popularity.

Here’s where Content Delivery Networks (CDN) can help. CDNs act as distributed servers connected by private fiber links that speed digital content delivery, such as web pages and video, to the user via internet service provider last-mile connections. This method minimizes latency or slow response times and eases the traffic load on a customer’s own network. The closer the CDN edge server is to a user, the faster the content will be delivered.

During times of high traffic -- for the whole internet as opposed to a single area -- CDNs can help by distributing traffic loads as widely as possible, serving customer traffic from local data centers instead of a centralized location. When a user heads to a website, for example, the edge server closest to him or her is the one that delivers the content. This allows the data to travel the shortest distance possible, reducing latency delays and speeding up page load times.

To help solve this, Limelight offers a Web Acceleration service that hastens the delivery of static and dynamic content during high-traffic periods. This means you can continue serving users without compromising your ideal user experience. A web accelerator can help ensure that your site loads quickly, that your customers are happy, and that you can spend less money on a web presence that functions more effectively.

Although often overlooked when choosing a CDN, content storage choices directly impact workflow, total cost, and access speed. Poorly integrated storage can make managing a large content library much more difficult. Access costs can exceed storage costs, and access speed can suffer from inefficient storage placement and slow transfer. Simple storage provides an adequate origin for digital content delivery. However, intelligent storage services can dramatically improve the user experience and give you more control, including where and how content is ingested, stored, replicated and delivered. Policies can be modified based on traffic patterns, user requirements, and other business needs to squeeze out the last bits of latency and deliver a stellar user experience.

Fortunately, Limelight’s origin storage has a vast capacity, wide distribution, and a powerful API library, meaning that users can still access their favorite streaming programs even if they aren’t cached nearby.

The main purpose of a CDN is to speed up the delivery of content to end users by minimizing response time, reducing bandwidth consumption and costs, and providing the scalability needed to handle high peak traffic loads. This makes CDNs a requisite technology to battle the traffic surges that have occurred – and will continue to occur- since the COVID-19 outbreak.

Learn more about Edgio's CDN and other services for streaming video, Edge Services and Cloud Security.

Source:

1. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/