A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers that work together to deliver web content to users based on their geographic location, the origin of the web page, and the content delivery server. The primary goal of a CDN is to improve the speed and performance of content delivery, reduce latency, and enhance user experience by serving the content from a server that is geographically closer to the user.
CDNs store and cache copies of web content (such as images, videos, CSS, and JavaScript files) on multiple servers across different locations worldwide. When a user requests content, the CDN redirects the request to the server closest to the user, minimizing the data travel distance and accelerating the content delivery.
By using a CDN, websites can experience several benefits, including:
Popular CDN providers include Cloudflare, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, and Fastly.