Businesses and entities increasingly rely on the Internet and Internet technologies such as web hosting as critical infrastructure to conduct everyday business activities. By definition, the Internet is a network of networks, and by design, the Internet introduces multiple "bottlenecks" where nodes on the network become chokepoints due to its high centrality.
Traditional infrastructure architectures are heavily reliant on models that provide for centralized control for security, scalability and reliability. But as business needs and the exponential growth in the usage of the Internet outstrips the growth in equipment capacity and network bandwidth, the first and last mile limitations as well as backbone delays of the Internet render these centralized infrastructures "chokepoints".
John Jervis, the Vice President of Sales at Vodien Internet Solutions, a Singapore web hosting company, says, "The friendly, simplified user interface provided by web browsers to the World Wide Web masks the complexities of the Internet and the networks involved in delivering content to your screen in all richness and interactivity. Content from real-time media streams to mission critical data needs to be delivered with low latency and high availability, and we're seeing issues with current networks coping with this surge in usage. Needless to say, in today's interconnected work-life digital ecosystem, network and application slow-downs or outages are highly unacceptable. This is the reason why we're investing heavily in a CDN that allows our clients to enjoy high availability of their websites, and greatly enhanced loading speeds."
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a form of edge computing where services are pushed away from centralized points to logical edges of the network. Copies of data are synchronized across various sites, each site having its own dedicated bandwidth to service clients. The capacity of the CDN is a sum total of the combined bandwidth which can handle significant increase in concurrent access to services. CDN leverages on the redundancy of distributed sites to provide reliability of services. Strategically placed sites allow faster delivery of content as clients are serviced with the most cost effective route.
"Simply put, with CDN, web hosting on Vodien no longer has a single point of failure. Network outages due to switch failures won't cripple content access as clients get routed around the distributed CDN. Customers who require additional capacity may request so on demand as CDN can load balance demand across its sites. Most importantly, from a security and availability prospective, business continues even if your main server goes down as there is minimal downtime due to the distributed redundancy in CDN," says Jervis.
