Content Delivery Networks

A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, to give it its full name, is a network of geographically distributed servers (and some smarts to control them) that contain copies of static assets such as images, pdfs, download files and so on. The idea is that you upload your static assets to a CDN which in turn distributes copies of them to servers around the globe. CDNs are designed to deliver media assets to your visitors’ web browsers as fast as possible, which in turn gives them the best possible web experience with no speed reduction under heavy website load. 

When visitors to your site attempt to access these assets, they are routed to the nearest CDN server rather then your web server. So when a web visitor in, say, Japan access your website, the images will be delivered to him from a CDN server in Tokyo; greatly speeding up his access - a win for him, and off-loading all the image requests from your server to the CDN - a win for you. Your web servers now only need to respond to requests for dynamic content this reduces load and cost.

Most of the major cloud players; Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace, and so on have their own CDNs. Which one you use is largely a question of convenience; they are roughly feature equivalent. So if you are running your sites on Microsoft's Azure, then the AzureCDN is probably the one to use. If you are an AWS customer - go for CloudFront.

We recently completed migrating a number of Shearings Group's websites from on-premises hosting, to the cloud; Amazon's cloud in this case. We knew that just hosting the sites at Amazon would give our client's sites the bandwith they needed during peak trading, but we wanted a seamless integration between our Web Travel Platform the Amazon CDN as well so we set about bridign the asset manager in WTP with Amazon's CDN; Cloudfront.

We are pleased to announce that WTP is now fully integrated with Cloudfront. A WTP website doesn't even have to be hosted on Amazon's network to reap the benefits of this latest enhancement; it works on-premises as well. High resolution images fom WTP's asset library can now be cropped, scaled and processed on the fly, with the resulting web-ready images loaded directly into the CDN and distruted around the panet in seconds for super-fast download by your customers. And the great thing about it is, you can forget all the technical stuff above... it just works, seamlessly.

Get in touch...

It costs nothing to start a conversation with Zolv and we’re more than happy to answer any questions you may have about digital marketing and selling online. Click below to start the ball rolling.