by Stuart Hardy, Business Unit Manager of EOH’s Carrier and Network Solutions Division
A content delivery network (CDN) speeds up the serving of content on websites by caching it in distributed data centres. The net effect of this is that the content is located closer to the point of request than if it were merely stored on a single server in one position.
EOH teams up with Cloudflare for CDN
EOH will be deploying a CDN in conjunction with Cloudflare at the Teraco data centre in South Africa. It will drive up to 6 Gbps of international content into the local peering community. This will reduce the cost of accessing the content and improve the quality and speed of delivery. Cloudflare uses the latest hardware, web server technology and network routing in a CDN that is able to process millions of requests per second. Its nodes are located on the most strategic points in the Internet – it has 28 data centres across the world. The result is that content can be very quickly distributed, no matter where the request originates.
Faster content access
Because websites have their content cached on so many nodes, with high speed connections between them, they load faster. Websites in the Cloudflare CDN are known to load twice as fast, no matter where the visitors are located. So not only do website visitors have faster loading websites, the website owners are able to offer an improved user experience.
Content is also accessed faster because a CDN allows for pre-caching, so content only needs to be downloaded once, no matter how many times and from how many different locations it is accessed.
Furthermore, a CDN increases the number of concurrent connections that a browser can make to a single domain. Because CDN files are stored on a different domain to the website itself, this effectively allows the number of connections to be doubled.
Bandwidth savings
Another effect of a CDN is that it cuts down on the amount of bandwidth required to serve content. Cloudflare claims a bandwidth saving of up to 60%. This is obviously a very significant saving for websites that serve a lot of content on a daily basis, which in turn reduces hosting costs.
EOH will make Cloudflare content freely available at Nap Africa peering points, and at JINX and CINX.
Cloudflare has some of the most viewed content in the world, so EOH’s partnership with Cloudflare will have a significant impact in the South African Internet market.
Stuart Hardy has been in the ICT industry since 1997, has been in the Telecommunications industry since 1997, intimately involved in product development, operations and product marketing roles. He has held Executive level positions in some of the largest Operators in South Africa and has founded and driven two successful start-up companies in the Mobile data and Wireless networking spaces. Today, Stuart is a Divisional Director for EOH in their Telecommunications sector.
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