Why your legacy CDN doesn’t meet the needs of your modern website

by Andy Wyatt on August 29, 2019

Years ago, when Internet Explorer was king and most people browsed the web via a wired desktop device, content delivery networks (CDNs) helped businesses accelerate content delivery by overcoming middle mile latency and routing issues. By caching static content assets and serving them from servers closer to the user, CDNs provided significantly faster content delivery compared to traditional hosting.

Since then, the average web page size has increased more than 240 percent. The extra baggage created by dynamic content, video, and JavaScript as well as the explosion of different devices and connection speeds — bottlenecks for users have shifted to the congested wireless connections, such as Wi-Fi, 4G, 3G, and LTE. This “last mile” is a place where traditional CDNs have little effect on performance.

Legacy CDNs weren’t built for modern application delivery

Legacy technology can also hinder engagement, resulting in poor user experience. Traditional CDNs aren’t able to identify which resources are essential for user engagement, so a visitor will have to wait for the entire application to download before they can interact. A modern, intelligent CDN can identify images, HTML, JavaScript, etc., and prioritize the data sent to web browsers. This allows your customers to interact with a partial download of a web app — dramatically reducing the time to first engagement. This is significant because when wait time goes down, conversions go up.

After decreasing wait time by 40 percent, Pinterest saw a 15 percent increase in SEO traffic and a 15 percent increase in sign-ups.
Ancestry.com increased conversions by 7 percent after improving render time by 68 percent and load time by 64 percent.

As web pages increase in size and complexity, legacy CDNs can become a corporate liability. According to Google research, more than half of visitors abandon your site if it takes more than three seconds to load. Today’s consumers expect a dynamic website that looks great and loads quickly whether they’re on Google Fiber or an in-flight Wi-Fi connection.

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CDNs should do more than speed up delivery — they need built-in security

Today’s modern businesses have to worry about more than performance when it comes to application delivery. There are new security threats that must be considered, including common malicious cyber attacks, such as distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS).

DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm application servers with requests in order to prevent access to a website, web app, or other online resources. DDoS attacks can last a few hours or even several days, costing businesses on average between $20,000 to $40,000 per hour in mitigation and lost revenue. And they are on the rise — Kaspersky recently reported an 84 percent increase in the total number of DDoS attacks.

As DDoS attacks grow in strength and size, it’s more important than ever that your CDN be able to absorb DDoS traffic to help you combat these types of attacks and allow you to maintain availability to ensure continuous service for your customers. When properly configured, a modern CDN should be able to help you withstand a flood of requests from attackers and still be able to respond to legitimate traffic.

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What to look for when choosing a modern CDN:

A worldwide caching and delivery network
The ability to scale with your business
24/7 concierge service and support
Optimization for any device or network
Built-in DDoS protection and proactive monitoring
Personalization, including advanced caching rules

Is your website equipped to navigate the sea of 3G, 4G, 5G, and other wireless networks? Can it deliver a great user experience on any device? Can it withstand a DDoS attack?

Instart’s intelligent CDN is built to:

Increase web performance. Our scalable, global infrastructure includes POPs in every major population center, ensuring fast static and dynamic content delivery anywhere in the world. Advanced first, middle, and last mile optimization, as well as purpose-built inter-proxy protocols improve network performance between your origin and your customers.
Improve control and functionality. Automatically optimize content, such as image format and size, to reduce data transfer while delivering the best visual quality for the endpoint’s capabilities. Use advanced caching rules to help offload origin pressure and purge caches in seconds.
Control all traffic. Run advanced routing, prioritization, and business logic from the edge. Layer 7 routing rules enable you to route to multi-origin and microservice architecture.
Maintain accessibility. You don’t have to sacrifice protection in order to deliver high-performance experiences. Instart’s globally-distributed network is built to absorb even large-scale DDoS attacks so that your web applications and websites stay running against the latest threats.

Accelerate the user experience over every mile with Instart, so you can deliver content securely and quickly to any device, in any location on any connection.

Fully protect your brand from the latest malicious threats without impacting performanceRequest a demo