Guest blog by Jorge Román, CEO de Transparent Edge Services
Let’s talk about something that matters to almost every single web site out there: speed optimization. To talk about this, we have to mention an essential key player: the CDN. A CDN plays an important role in optimizing the speed of a website. However, many people are not familiar with how a Content Delivery Network (CDN) influences the optimization of speed.
What’s a CDN?
Let’s get down to business and define CDN. A CDN is a set of worldwide locations, which we will call from here on PoP (points of presence). According to customizable parameters, PoPs locally distribute content from servers and cache files that do not need permanent updating. This system enables and caches the static content of a website, such as HTML files, CSS, JavaScript, and image and video files, these are all files that remain the same for each user. By making these static files available on a CDN with many servers located around the world, as is the case of Transparent Edge Services, the content reaches the end-user from the closest server to their location. By shortening the path information has to travel, bandwidth consumption and latency are reduced, and security is greatly improved.
The use of a CDN like Transparent Edge Services, the only Spanish CDN, improves the user experience, accelerating the delivery of web content to the end-user because:
- The route taken by the data is better
- Servers from which the content is delivered are optimized to serve traffic more efficiently
- These servers can handle a huge amount of traffic at certain times
So, why are we talking about servers here? This is simple. It’s because Transparent Edge Services is part of the amazing ecosystem of OVHCloud and as a partner, it complements and facilitates part of our day-to-day activities. For us, it is very important that our suppliers comply with specific technological requirements such as:
- No limits in terms of bandwidth, and OVHCloud gives us unlimited bandwidth
- At a technical level, it allows us to deploy actual physical machines and not virtual networks in a matter of minutes in any of the globally distributed data centers. For this, we consistently use bare metal dedicated servers.
These specifications allow a CDN to reach out to customers at their closest location, deploying in a fast and quick way a PoP anywhere. This makes the web content come up at the blink of an eye.
Clues for additional optimization
In addition to a CDN, some other benefits and features can be used to improve your web optimization and make it faster for search engines. All of these can be found in OVHCloud Marketplace:
- The understanding of images and videos: This improves the performance of your server by reducing the size of the multimedia content that reaches the end-user. Use an image optimization system.
- Website stabilization: This minimizes risks during traffic peaks.
- Protection of the web site: Becoming the first line of defense at a security layer level (user requests are dealt with by our servers, without having to reach their original servers). Look to defend yourself against DDos attacks, for example.
- Reduce the saturation of your server: Since the content is distributed among several servers, the load is carried out simultaneously from the cache. It guarantees that your own bandwidth is not wasted or overconsumed and that the server does not crash and at the same time respond faster. And in case your server goes down for whatever reason, web content will always be displayed because we cache this content in the Edge services.
- Global positioning: Using a non-localized IP address contributes to positioning in your country of origin and makes it easier for users around the globe to reach your content.
Therefore, the use of a CDN, and the multiple services previously mentioned, improves the speed and quality of the content delivered to the end-user and contributes to a positioning strategy (yes, a CDN accelerates the download of the web, which improves positioning). This, therefore impacts the search ranking of a site. What are you waiting for to improve your positioning and rank up? Take a look at OVHCloud Marketplace and find European solutions like Transparent Edge Services that make the internet a better place, guaranteeing the essential foundations of all network access: speed, security, and performance.
