6 Ways Your Store Could Benefit from Content Distribution Networks (CDN)

There are a number of strong benefits you can get from using a Content Distribution Networks approach for your store. Plus, you’re going to want to get in on this early, because according to MarketsandMarkets.com, the market share for the service is going to grow to over $15 billion by 2020. Here are some examples of some of the specific advantages you’ll get, explaining why so many other companies are already using it and will continue to into the future.

Performance Boost

One of the reasons why a CDN can increase your store’s performance has to do with how CDN servers already being used. For example, the Google CDN is so huge that the chances are good that someone has already been to a site that uses Google CDN, meaning you won’t have to download those files again. Any time you can save files from being downloaded, this is a big deal.

As a result, if you use a CDN to leverage its abilities, your store will benefit from fast performance at a high-quality more often, no matter what’s in it. Even when it comes to content that you can’t cache, there are advanced CDN options out there that can handle it anyway. However, the main point is that if your store makes use of high-definition video, then buffering that takes 10 seconds or longer is going to lose you customers. Using a CDN can speed this up, and for every second faster your videos load, you will likely see a huge increase in sales and interactions.

Another reason for a boost in performance is that a distributed network across a wide enough area means an increased likelihood that the customer connecting to your store will be connected to one of them. The closer they are to a node, the faster the downloads they’ll enjoy, translating to better performance in your store and a more positive experience for them, plus more sales for you.

Improved Security Against Denial of Service Attacks and Others

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected through the Internet and more and more people come online, many consequences of this will also rise in frequency. For example, DDoS attacks are going to become a problem. All that is required to take your store offline with this method is enough people who have some simple knowledge and knowhow. This means that it’s up to store owners to figure out some countermeasures they can use to stop the attacks, because otherwise they are inevitable.

Fortunately, there are DDoS defenses that become possible directly through a CDN. These defenses make use of a CDN in order to do real-time analyzing of attacks as they occur. Then, you can create customized rule adaptations through either creating new rules or changing the ones that are there. That way, you can tell where the attacks are coming from and distribute resources plus reroute and shut them down in order to render them inert.

Another reason CDN defenses can be effective against a DDoS is through rate control adaptation. Basically, all of the monitoring means that you can limit the request rate from certain areas. They may even be able to reveal information about IP addresses so that they can be blocked.

Essentially, the system is adaptive and making use of this adaptation can shut down a DDoS attack in a way that is less possible through other systems. If you use one with your store, the inevitable attacks that come to your store once you get popular enough will be stopped in their tracks.

The way all this works help guard against the “Oprah Effect,” in other words, just like how just about everyone has seen Oprah and anyone going on Oprah’s show will instantly gain the benefits of her spiraling network of fame, you may reap the rewards of increased visibility, but this visibility will also lead to more DDoS type attacks. That’s why you need a flexible network to help you with it.

Increased Stability and Availability

No matter how good your hosting is at scaling or covering capacity, it won’t match the level that CDNs used by companies like Google. If you use an effective CDN, your network latency will go down, and you’ll suffer less packet loss.

When users try to connect to your store during high-stress periods like when you have much higher traffic than normal, when there are spikes in service, or even when your server itself is having issues, chances are good that your customers are going to encounter problems if you’re on your own and not on a CDN.

It’s pretty unlikely that your infrastructure is going to be able to handle all of this all by itself. Plus, again, even if you can on the low-end of things, by the time you gain more and more traffic, you’re only asking for trouble. It’s much better to be prepared ahead of time. And you can be prepared, by hooking into a CDN, since the highly distributed infrastructure will make sure that all of the assorted server platforms are up to the task.

Every second your store remains either up at all, or more stable and supplying better experience to your customers is another second of increased revenue. Depending on the scale of your operation, this could be a significant amount of money that you lose or save every day, depending on whether you decide to leverage these networks or not.

More Data

Because CDNs are so huge and collectively account for a giant percentage of the world’s traffic, there’s a tremendous amount of information available there. So, store owners who connect into these networks can often get access to this data. You can understand more about your customers including through real-time monitoring and general information about how they get to your store and what they do when they’re their, including other trends you can tap into in general.

This also applies to security data as well. Many CDNs do active monitoring of threats in order to pre-empt them, and they may issue reports about these threats so you can properly prepare your store.

Ideal for Stores That Rely on Media

The performance boost you get is even more pronounced if you’re streaming HD video considering the bandwidth going across the networks. The boost is undeniably there if you have a simpler front page and store, increasing performance by a few seconds in many cases for certain. However, the more data you need to transfer across to customers visiting your store, the more missed packets and the more chance of some instability in the network taking down your video stream enough that it fails to load for some time, stutters significantly during playback or just fails altogether. It really is important to go with stability and performance boosts for a media-heavy strategy.

Overall, leveraging CDN tech just makes good sense for your business since a huge number of companies already use it including GStatic Google Static Content, which uses 35% among the top 10k companies.

For more information about using content distribution Networks to improve just about every aspect of your business, please contact us today. We can help guide you towards the proper use of it that’s in line with your particular situation.