Things are constantly evolving when it comes to the digital economy, and it seems like, more and more companies from various industries are opting for content marketing when they decide to attract more consumers.

Those who are familiar with content marketing will tell you that one of the most crucial elements of it is your website. Its main purpose is to properly sell your services and products not only within your country but internationally as well. 

Millions of business owners today spend substantial amounts of money to make sure their consumers have a high-quality web experience. That’s why Content Delivery Network has become very popular, but since there are lots of CDN providers out there, you need to take these things into consideration before you pick one.

Smart Ways To Select The Best Content Delivery Network

What Type Of Content Do You Want To Have?

Even though this may seem irrelevant, it’s actually one of the most crucial things to think through. In case you didn’t know, different content requires different tools and solutions. For instance, video and photo content requires a lot more bandwidth in comparison to written content.

If a majority of your content is static, then you should assess vendors that have a solid number of POPs committed to your resources. It’s quite common for CDN sellers to boast about the size of their network, but the real question is how much of POP footprint is going to be available for the content you have?

In terms of dynamic content, “larger” doesn’t necessarily represent an advantage. In this case, the most important thing is the quality of the end-to-end connectivity, the optimization software stack, and the intelligence of the middle mile. 

Reliability 

It is widely known that nowadays it’s difficult to have a website that doesn’t have any glitches, however, with the right content delivery network, you’ll be able to keep your site running properly even when it’s experiencing some traffic issues.

Namely, it’s of huge importance for CDN service providers to manage your website the right way, which can be accomplished if they opt for auto-routing traffic around downed network servers.

Furthermore, these providers can integrate extra hardware and software redundancy through deals with several carriers that enable them to employ dedicated out-of-band channels for communicating with servers when an urgent situation occurs. 

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Latency

Bear in mind, that the geographical distance between your visitors, you, and servers play a major role when it comes to the user experience because precisely this distance is the one that determines how quickly every object on your website loads.

The closer the visitors are to the servers the less time it’s going to take for everything to load on your web page. Keep in mind, that latency can be a huge website speed killer. In order to reduce latency, you need to utilize a solid Content Delivery Network because it has various servers in different parts of the world, placed in numerous strategic locations.

Server Speed And Throughput 

Besides latency, another crucial element of it is the power of the server. Although your servers are close to your visitors, that doesn’t mean that they cannot be slow, for various reasons, for example:

  • The servers are not capable of handling the number of concurrent connections from the browsers of your visitors
  • The servers are behind an undercapacity load balancer
  • The hard drivers are extremely slow and old
  • The servers have a tiny pipe to the internet

But do not worry, content delivery network servers are always tuned for performance and are capable of responding to any request fast and sending the bytes out quickly. 

Support/Service

High-quality content delivery networks must be able to offer excellent technical and customer support at any given moment. It doesn’t matter whether it is through email or phone, it has to be available 24/7. 

Besides that, they must have a technical support staff that has great communication skills and is very friendly and efficient when it comes to responding to any problems and resolving them as quickly as possible.

Costs 

Most traditional content delivery networks charge a lot for their services. For instance, if you are using Amazon CloudFront, and you want to pay for a monthly bandwidth of 500 GB, then you will have to set aside $43 every single month. 

On the other hand, Google Cloud is around $40, however, if you’re a blogger it can go up to $200 each month.

As it was stated in the beginning, there are many Content Delivery Networks on the market, but it can be pretty time-consuming to select the right one, which is why we gave you some guidelines, to help you find the right one faster.