When you take your business online—and if you haven’t, you should really consider it—you need to learn about content delivery optimization. This is a characteristic of your web presence that will ensure you get the most out of the work you invest in your company.
But what is Content Delivery Optimization?
That’s a good question. Content Delivery Optimization is, essentially how you maximize the delivery of all content related to your business across the web. For the most part, you will use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to do this. A CDN is a network of proxy servers deployed through several data centers which have been distributed around the world. Every CDN has the goal of serving content to all end users using the highest possible service availability as well as the highest possible online performance.
And What Does A CDN Actually Do?
Basically, a CDN serves an exceptionally large percentage of all of the content on the web today. This could include anything like:
- applications (e-commerce function, web portals)
- downloadable objects (software, media files, documents)
- on-demand media
- live streaming media
- social networks (and associate applications)
- web objects (text, graphics, scripts used/displayed on a website or page)
Providers of Content for mobile applications—that is to say: media companies, e-commerce vendors, retailers—pay for the services of the content delivery network who distributes their content across the web, all the way to their possible audience. The way this works, the CDN pays an ISP (internet service provider) or a carrier or a network operator to host its servers through their data centers.
CDNs certainly provide their members improved performance and better availability but they also help to thin out the massive traffic that can filter through servers, directly from the content provider’s original infrastructure. In addition, content delivery networks give the original content provider yet more protection from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks by acting as a kind of buffer online.
How Does a CDN Optimize Content?
In short, if you have content you want delivered online (because you have a business you want to advertise) then you need to find the right content delivery network for you. Each one has its own means for finding the appropriate end audience and for delivering their content to them.