Benefits of using CDN

Content Delivery Networks(CDN) are mainly used to hold static resources like images, videos, CSS or javascript files. You can find all the common javascript libraries like Jquery or frameworks like backbone are hosted for free on servers provided by big web organizations like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc.

Commercial CDN's for private use are also available on Amazon, Microsoft Windows Azure & MaxCDN. A reference through CDN is usually recommended as it enhances the performance of your website. Below are some benefits of using a CDN over other methods of referencing.

Following are some Benefits of using CDN.

1. Fast download of your static resources :

Say yours is an application with users from all over the world, your servers are hosted by India but the people accessing your website reside in Europe. If javascript files for your angular framework are hosted with your servers in India, your website is obviously going to take some time to load as it needs to download all the javascript files and being at a distance it is going to hinder the speed. If you have referenced your angular using CDN, the website will load faster as the CDN networks will try to provide the required javascript files from the local servers thus increasing the performance of your application.

2. Common javascript files are pre-cached :

Libraries like jQuery are used in almost all applications. There’s a high chance that someone visiting your web pages has already been to a website which is using the Google CDN. Hence, your browser will not download such libraries as it must have already downloaded it, amplifying your application's performance.

3. Different Domain Names boosts performance :

Web Browsers limit the number of downloads from a single domain from four to six active connections at a time. So if you have multiple javascript files to be downloaded hosted on your web server i.e single domain, it will definitely affect your performance as slow downloads will result in slow web page loading. CDN files are hosted under different domain names.Thus enabling the download of essential javascript files fast.

4. Hosting Infrastructure offered by tech giants :

You may have the best hosting servers available at your disposal but they certainly cannot as good as Google's, Microsoft's or Yahoo's servers. Or the availability offered by these tech giants.

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