Content Delivery 
Network

Meet Zettabyte. Wait a minute. Meet who? Zettabyte is the newest kid on the internet block. If you thought it was difficult to comprehend the exabyte (1 EB = 1000 petabytes = 1 million terabytes = 1 billion gigabytes) then good luck with figuring out the zettabyte, which is equivalent to 1000 EB. To put the Zettabyte in perspective, if the 300 grams of coffee on your desk equals one GB, a zettabyte would have the same volume as the great wall of China!

Here is a quick history lesson. In 2006, the combined space of all computer hard drives in the world was estimated at approximately 160 exabytes. By 2009, the entire World Wide Web was estimated to contain close to 500 exabytes. Now, annual global IP traffic will pass the zettabyte (1000 exabytes) threshold by the end of 2016, and will reach 2 zettabytes per year by 2019.¹

This is annual traffic. Not the amount of data stored in small and big hard disks or data centres around the works, but the amount of data consumed by businesses and individuals. That’s plenty of byte. The number of users accessing internet content and services are growing at an incredible rate. This causes massive strain on the servers which are hosting the content and applications.

As a business owner, you have to ensure that your website is quickly accessible by the end user. Customers demand their vendors to give them what they want— and it better be quick. If a website faces a sudden surge in traffic because of a new product launch or viral content, the site may crash resulting in huge missed opportunities. This is when a content delivery network (CDN) can help.

The physical distance between your local servers and your visitors plays an important role on user experience. This geographical distance determines how fast the end user is able to access your pages and interact with your website. A content delivery network (CDN) makes copies of your website and caching the contents of the page across multiple fast-loading servers all over the world. When someone visits your website, servers nearest to the user respond to the request, thus preventing bottleneck and improving response time.

A CDN is especially useful if your website traffic is from all over the world. However, you don’t need high traffic for a CDN to pay off. You can use flexible pricing plans to ensure that even the few thousand visitors to your website have the best user experience.

Apart from helping to deal with traffic surge, a CDN also improves security by minimizing damage from DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. Long term benefits of using a CDN include better search rankings since your web pages load faster. In fact, Google had officially announced in 2010 that site speed will be play a crucial role in their search rankings. According to Google, faster sites create happy users and they have noticed that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.

The CDN also helps you to understand your customers’ behavior and personalise the user experience. By analyzing this data, you can make smart improvements to improve your website performance.

In a nutshell, a CDN significantly improves the Quality of Service (QoS) and ensures your website loads fast, media downloads and streams quickly, and your site is always-on on any device from anywhere in the world.

Here are a few examples of companies who have successfully used CDNs to improve customer experience and boost profitability. Hostelworld, a platform that is used by major travel sites such as Lonely Planet and Tripadvisor transferred 93 percent of website traffic to CDN services, which helped to decrease waiting times by 43 percent. Shopzilla which operates a portfolio of shopping web sites, increased its revenues by 12 percent, with just a 400 millisecond improvement in website performance. The web traffic for Yahoo increased by 9 percent with a 100 millisecond increase in website performance. Mailchimp, an email marketing service improved its’ app load times by more than 100 percent by using CDN.

Almost every business who care about their user’s experience have used CDN. It’s time you use it too.

In today’s fast-paced, digital environment, customers demand high quality content delivered in a fast and efficient manner. StarHub Velocity CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a secure and scalable platform that optimises the delivery of multimedia and data-intensive content quickly and seamlessly to your target audience. StarHub Velocity CDN Suite of Solutions include Web Acceleration Solution accelerates page loading time to enable ultra-fast and responsive interaction with end-users, File Delivery Solution makes fast and reliable large file transfers possible to end-users no matter the size or geographic location, Media Streaming enables users to stream live broadcast or pre-recorded media content over the Internet to a large global audience and Managed and Value Adds provide end-to-end professional and consulting services to manage customer content delivery.

Follow StarHub Business on Linkedin for the latest business updates.

1. According to a recent report by Cisco.