As many business owners and managers will know from experience, website downtime can have a huge negative impact. It can lead to frustration and stress for the business, but it can also lead to loss of business, a negative impact on reputation, and a damaging effect on customers. This is why you need to take steps to reduce the risk of downtime, particularly in this digital era when you face so much competition from rival businesses.
Uptime is essential for any business that wants to succeed in today’s digital age, but this is something that can be impacted by many things. This includes hardware failures, spikes in traffic to the website resulting from things such as increased popularity or even malicious activity, and more. If the server goes down and your website is no longer accessible, it naturally causes huge issues for your business and your customers. A solid content delivery network can help to reduce the risk of downtime. We will learn more about this in this article.
How a CDN Can Help
All businesses need a reliable website with minimal downtime, and this is where a CDN can prove very useful. There are various ways in which it can help with this, some of which are:
Benefits of Load Balancing
During busy periods with heavy traffic, your website could be at risk of slowing down or even crashing. This is something that you need to avoid, and a CDN can help you to do this through load balancing. This means that network traffic is distributed equally and balanced out to ensure spikes in traffic are dealt with efficiently. This can save you and your business a lot of stress and hassle resulting from downtime.
Intelligent Failover
When it comes to maintaining reliability and continuous access for users, failover can prove invaluable. CDNs use failover to prevent the loss of traffic when a server becomes unavailable. This is done by routing the traffic to a server that is still operational rather than the traffic being lost due to a non-functional server. This is done automatically by the CDN, with the traffic being routed to a standby system to prevent service disruption to users.
Effective Transfer of Traffic
Some CDNs use routing methods such as Anycast to ensure that internet traffic is transferred to functional data centers. This will improve response time, and other data centers are less likely to become overwhelmed due to high traffic levels. This can prove very useful if there is a traffic spike, which can occur in situations such as a DDoS attack, among other things.
Find the Right Provider
These are some of the key ways a CDN can help combat the problem of downtime, which has a huge positive impact on your business. Of course, you need to ensure you find the right provider to benefit from a service that is efficient, effective, and reliable.
