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Glossary

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

A CDN is a worldwide network of edge servers that cache and serve your site close to visitors, cutting latency and absorbing traffic spikes.

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a geographically distributed set of servers that cache copies of your website and deliver them from the location nearest to each visitor. Instead of every request travelling to your origin server, most are answered at a nearby edge node.

How it works

  • Static assets (images, CSS, JavaScript) are cached at edge locations called PoPs (Points of Presence).
  • A visitor in Tokyo is served from a Tokyo edge; a visitor in Berlin from a European one.
  • The origin is contacted only on a cache miss or for dynamic content.

Why it matters for hosting

A CDN reduces latency and TTFB, offloads bandwidth from your origin, and provides a buffer against ddos attacks and traffic surges. Most CDNs also terminate ssl-tls at the edge and speak http-2 and http-3.

Because traffic flows through the CDN's network first, an IP or dns lookup of a CDN-fronted site usually returns the CDN's address rather than the true origin.

See also

DNS (Domain Name System) DNS is the internet phone book that translates human-readable domain names like example.com into the IP addresses computers use to connect. SSL/TLS SSL/TLS is the encryption protocol that secures connections between browsers and servers, enabling HTTPS and protecting data in transit. HTTP/2 HTTP/2 is a major revision of HTTP that multiplexes many requests over one connection, reducing latency versus the older HTTP/1.1. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) A DDoS attack floods a server with traffic from many sources to overwhelm it and knock a website offline; mitigation absorbs or filters the flood. Caching Caching stores copies of data or pages so repeat requests are served instantly, reducing server work and dramatically speeding up websites.

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