In modern times when hosting is very cheap many people just choose hosting plan and forget about it. However as the site grows and welcomes more and more traffic, one has to think about its reliability, i.e. about CDN.
So what are the CDN advantages?
Your website will become much faster - this is the evident advantage of any CDN. Partially it is so because CDN companies have huge networks of servers, but it is not the only reason. Their servers are spread all over the world.
Caching is another advantage - it may help to save on resources of server and bandwidth, but many website owners just do not know how to use it correctly. Of course they are not to blame because caching has many different aspects and to know them all you have to be caching professional . Luckily it is natural that CDN providers are caching experts because it is one of their primary roles.
Also CDN allows protection in times of peak loads. Your website and business may become famous and attract a lot of traffic instantly just because of one article. CDN will help to cope with the load. CDN companies have networks of servers and the amount of resources may always be increased. This means that even if you don't use much resources they will be available to you if needed.
Protection from DDoS-attacks. If you ever had a website that was attacked this way, you understand all the importance. Your options are limited and your website will highly likely be unavailable for several hours that may prove to be costly. Because of the fact that all the traffic goes through CDN it is highly likely that the DDoS-attack will never reach your website.
The site is available even if your server is down. Usually if the server ceases to work your options are very limited. You are not able to change hosting quickly and that's why you have to wait while hosting provider corrects the problems he has. It won't be the case if you use CDN that caches the pages of your website. If your hosting stops to respond, the user will get the cached version of your website so there will never be the time when your website is completely unavailable even if your main server goes down.
Conclusions
In case you have a website you care about and it attracts high volumes of traffic, pay attention to CDN. It will cost some additional money but you will save on headache in case of security problems and high loads.
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