Content Delivery Networks 101

What is a Content Delivery Network?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. A CDN allows for the quick transfer of Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and most importantly videos. The majority of web traffic is served through CDNs, including traffic from major sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.

The major advantages of using CDNs are:

Global reach with less latency

If your main web server is based in San Antonio, users from Germany or Singapore have to make a few trans-continental electronic hops when they access your files. To achieve less latency, CDNs are placed closer to the users at popular locations around the world. That translates into faster load times, better user experience and conversions.

Lower Network Load

Network loads increase sharply during peak times. Big numbers of visitors on a server consumes more resources therefore decreasing the performance of a network. CDNs help to decrease the “traffic jams” of the internet.

Increased reliability

A content that is received through a CDN has a better chance of being more coherent. This is crucial to operators delivering heavier files like better quality video, streams,VR or AR experiences, etc.

CDNs provide data analytics

Many commercial CDNs provide file usage reports. Those reports can supplement your own website analytics. In other words, you know where every cent of your money is going and you can use the analytics to dissect into your performance metrics and improve even more.

Cost savings

A global CDN eliminates the need to pay for high-priced foreign hosting. It offers a single platform that will work across regions at a reasonable price.. It’s a cost-effective way to enhance web performance across the globe.

CDNs provide protection against DDoS

A CDN takes the traffic and keeps your website up and running even before the DDoS attack ever reaches your data center. This means you need not be concerned about this type of attacks impacting your data center.

CDN market is heating up

As people consume more video, more often, for longer periods of time, at higher quality, and on more devices, the Content Delivery Network market is as hot as it has ever been. Currently, the biggest names in CDN market are Akamai (US), Google (US), Level 3 Communications (US), Limelight Networks (US), Amazon Web Services (US), Internap (US), Verizon (US), CDNetworks (Korea), Tata Communications (India and Singapore), and StackPath (US).

According to a new market research, the CDN market size is expected to grow from USD 7.47 Billion in 2017 to USD 30.89 Billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 32.8% during the forecast period.

So far the trends that were driving the growth of CDNs were:

Expanded Internet usage and reach

Over the course of the last decade, the number of internet users worldwide has tripled from 1 billion in 2005 to 3 billion in 2015. Cisco forecasts that in 2021 there will be around 105,800 GB per second being transferred. That’s 278 EB per month. Video will account for the biggest part. The traffic of this type of content will grow threefold from 2016 to 2021 and will account for 82% of all internet traffic in 2021.

High expectations

A great user experience across all devices is everything when it comes to running a website or application. 1 out of 4 customers will abandon a webpage that takes more than 4 seconds to load and the advantage of 250 milliseconds of page load time, according to recent research, is what keeps your customer from going to a competitor. Businesses can’t afford latency.

Google search

Google started the mobile friendly search initiative. It means that mobile-optimized website could offer a competitive advantage in search results. This paved the way for dynamic mobile optimized CDNs.

Internet security

DDoS attacks are on the rise. Demand for improved Internet security is growing accordingly. That also increased the growth of CDNs.

CDNs alone are no longer the best possible solution

The pace of the internet’s growth is astounding. It might be even too fast for the infrastructure that serves it. We need innovative solutions for content scaling and delivering because CDNs alone are not enough — they do have insufficiencies which include being too centralized; too costly to build and maintain; and their presence in low-availability areas is still too scarce.

The next step for internet infrastructure industry is sharing economy. Cisco predicts that global fixed broadband speeds will grow from 42.3 Mbps in 2018 to 53 Mbps in 2021. It signals that computers all around the world have significant amounts of unutilized bandwidth and storage. All this potential is wasted.

Virtually every computer in the world can act as a small Point-of-Presence (POP) of a CDN. And, as we already know, more POPs means more efficient internet. That is our goal at NOIA. To connect hundreds of thousands of computers around the world into a decentralized network that serves as an additional layer of the internet and improves the way content is delivered across the internet.

By creating NOIA Network we enormously amplify every essential benefit of CDNs and multi-CDNs. Hundreds of thousands of new POPs that cost close to nothing to set up will bring these changes: it will drive down the costs of content delivery even further; it will decrease latency because new nodes will grow the number of possible roads that data can take; and it will provide us with even stronger protection against DDoS attacks, Nevertheless, there’s one crucial difference between a CDN and NOIA Network. Instead of rewarding big CDN industry players, content providers now pay directly to the individual nodes doing the work.

NOIA’s profit sharing mechanism might actually be the reason why giants like Akamai or Amazon CloudFront don’t seem to be too excited about the idea of further decentralization in the internet infrastructure industry. It would simply remove the economic benefits of a highly centralized system and transfer them onto the individuals.

The effect of NOIA Network

Currently, setting up multi-CDNs is considered to be the smartest strategy out there. We almost agree. More Points-of-Presence(POP) means more connections and that provides data with more possible roads to travel.

We need more POPs but it’s doesn’t necessarily mean building more and more CDNs. NOIA Network found a way to increase the amount of POPs around the world without building costly data centers which are almost impossible to scale. Actually, we just have to put our current resources to work. We achieve that by connecting millions of computers around the world and utilizing their idle bandwidth and storage resources. This way NOIA Network establishes a global network of nodes that serves as an alternative layer of the internet infrastructure. It achieves all the aforementioned benefits of multi-CDNs and even surpasses them in efficiency. It’s the next big step for the internet infrastructure.

The direction is clear

If CDNs were the best solution we would all be streaming 4K videos with zero latency right now. And think about VR, AR, gaming, IoT or immersive video streaming. The technology is here but it’s still very expensive to deliver it through our current internet infrastructure. And that’s why we need more POPs, that’s why we need less costly “roads” for data to travel, that’s why we need NOIA Network.