Using CDN helps when Undersea Internet Cable Broke

We just suffered another disruption of undersea internet cable between Indonesia and Singapore which affected some major ISPs like Telkom, XL Axiata last week. As result, we can hardly open websites or services hosted in Singapore, which is where most of our server or VPS being hosted. Obviously, our client’s websites suffered of being very slow or even inaccessible. But we found that connection to services hosted outside Singapore works just fine, we also found that when we tried using VPN from other country beside Singapore, everything works just fine too.
The thing is, visitors or client’s don’t care about why it is slow in the moment, what they know is major services like Google, Facebook, Youtube are pretty much unaffected, we also can’t ask them or the visitors to use VPN to open our website, it’s simply a Big No No. Fortunately, we used Cloudflare as our DNS manager, its just that we don’t always activate their Free CDN. But because of this issue, we activated CDN for all websites maintained under Cloudflare and within minutes we got all our websites operates normally.

So how does CDN work?
Put it simply, Cloudflare or any other CDN(Content Delivery Network) works by using their networks distributed all over the globe to allow visitor from any country to reach to any of the fastest network as proxy to access our website. In this case, connection from Indonesia directly to Singapore is too slow. By activating CDN, visitors access through one of Cloudflare’s network which wasn’t affected by the broken undersea Internet cable to provide speedy web access and voila we are back on business.
Using CDN is recommended, especially if you are hosting at a countries far from your main target market, for example: hosted at Oregon, while most of your visitors are from Indonesia (You should move it closer, except if you have a good reason for it). You might not know where your website being hosted, you can find it out yourself with www.geoiptool.com by typing in your domain there (do it before you use CDN).

If you not sure which CDN to use, give Cloudflare a try, it’s free to use.
PS: I don’t get anything by recommending Cloudflare, it’s just that it helped us a lot as DNS or CDN.
Wonder if another Undersea Internet Cable disruption or fault happening? Check https://subtelforum.com/articles/category/cable-faults/

