Are we all aware of the staggering statistics about Future of Internet?
India will add 40% of the world’s incremental Internet users by 2020!
More than 175 million people will do their purchases online because of convenient payment options like e-wallets and easy payments. E-commerce business will be worth $17 billion at the end of FY 2016.
82% of CMOs (across all Industry verticals) report that the Brand health of their organization is directly proportional to the number of visitors of their websites.
When computing power was at a premium in 1990s, web pages were often hosted in local standalone servers and were served as unchanging text files. This type of static content is efficient, but it can quickly become stagnant and viewers lose interest. With the advent of low-cost computing and faster Internet speeds, the concept of Dynamic Content was burgeoned that could capture user attention due to sheer dynamism and possibilities of creativity. The low-cost pay-as-you-go model is ensured via virtualization when we have transformed to Cloud. In bygone days, IT would do a CAPEX investment in Hardware purchase and invest in maintenance especially when your best hired resources should be focusing on core business.
For the organizations where-in Internet facing Application/Site performance and users experience is the key to growth, Cloud Services powered by best CDN (Content Delivery Network) is the panacea. Quick, reliable, secure and personalized viewing experiences across all the devices on your fingertips is what CDN offers.
Empiricism is the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses. That’s where human beings sense of feeling will always reign over machines or robots. Businesses in all verticals flourish only when Empiricism gives way to a satisfied customer. It thrives on the fact that customer thinks exactly the thoughts which you want them to think so that they get hooked-on and his brain signals his fingers again and again to key in just the URL of your website and better still – don’t even open the competitor’s website on the adjacent tab.
CDN service providers delivers Internet contents like – web-objects, Applications, live/on-demand streaming media and social networks to the end-users.
Load-time, Availability, Response time, Security are few parameters on which a good CDN is adjudged.
Direct visible impact of CDN is on Business Revenue, Business Agility and increase in ability to take it to global scale.
How?
Take an example, Mr. ABC, the CIO of organization – XYZ is sitting in US with best Internet Connection speed (25 Mbps), his site is hosted in Data Center in India with Best Compute, Storage, and Network, Redundancy ensured at the First mile. When he accesses his website – www.xyz.com, he starts counting – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7…..while his eyes are forced to see that vexatious Loading icon.
Oops, it takes 8 seconds to load the Home Page of his own Brand. If I were a site visitor, I would definitely go to next tab and load another site to do justice to those 8 wasted seconds. So result is rise in distraction, confusion and higher chances of site abandonment and hence Revenue.
That’s where the concept of CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK was incepted.
Following are the series of steps executed when customer keys in his web-site address on the address bar of his browser:
Step 1: Browser contacts DNS for conversion into IP address
Step 2: Browser will establish connection with the web server that hosts the website using IP address
Step 3: Retrieval of HTML code over the internet of the requested web-page
Step 4: HTML Content is delivered over the internet to the browser which then displays the HTML page – bare bone html structure, followed by hyper-linked stuff – static images etc. and lastly Dynamic content.
Step 5: When you leave the browser window idle for long or close it, the connection with Web server will end
So Step#4 above entails the need of a CDN to ensure rendering of page with lightening speeds. In absence of CDN, the complications of middle-mile will ruin all the performance optimizations, best coding practices you might have followed in creating your website.
Static files like images, javascript, css files can be cached by the browser so that in future it doesn’t have to fetch them again. Of course, many technologies and CDNs exist which ensures caching. The Site owners face the chill wind with regard to performance only when there is good amount of Dynamic content in their website.
Dynamic content is web content that changes between subsequent requests based on user access time, user preferences and personal information in order to ensure an engaging online experience. Some of the world’s largest websites are powered primarily by dynamic content as static content cannot capture user interest. According to recent studies, Seventy-four percent of online consumers get frustrated when a website promotes content that isn’t tailored to their interests
E.g. Amazon is delivering you a personalized content experience in an attempt to make you buy more. Notice the section called “Buy It Again” below the items you want to purchase. Amazon is populating this section by pulling your previous orders from its backend servers. This is much more effective for upselling purposes than listing random items.
The very reason why site performance is impacted in case of dynamic content is due to enforced round trips to the origin server, as it cannot be cached.
Only few CDNs on the planet give the required acceleration to dynamic content. Several techniques like route optimization are needed to optimize communication between the CDN edge servers and origin infrastructure to deliver dynamic content to the user that avoids Internet problem spots.
So the philosophy of having good dynamic content in your website with the lure of increasing user interest and hence hits, should be carefully chalked out along with the appropriate choice of CDN adoption.
Walking with the false myths of considering CDN as just a redundancy (or good-to-have) service can jeopardize the Business strategy significantly and will eventually become the bane of Business advancement prospects.
Facing performance pressures with your Websites and Web Portals? Feel free to reach out to us at cdn@sifycorp.com.
