Sucuri Webinar: Beginner's Guide to CDNs
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All content is not created equally. Reducing the time it takes for each piece of data to travel from the host server to the client will provide lower latency and a more optimized user experience. Ultimately, this helps avoid dropoffs in users as a result of extended load times. Krystle covered how a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can make your sites better, faster and stronger. A CDN uses caching and multiple points of presence (PoP) around the world to serve your website quickly while ensuring the availability of your website during traffic spikes and DDoS attacks.
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Sucuri Webinar: Beginner's Guide to CDNs
- 5. • • •
- 9. Files that don’t need to be generated, modified, or processed based on user input. Such as JavaScript, CSS, Images and HTML files.
- 10. Files that don’t need to be generated, modified, or processed based on user input. Such as JavaScript, CSS, Images and HTML files. Website content that changes frequently and engages the reader which can include animations, video or audio.
- 11. Files that don’t need to be generated, modified, or processed based on user input. Such as JavaScript, CSS, Images and HTML files. Website content that changes frequently and engages the reader which can include animations, video or audio.
- 23. v
- 24. 40% of consumers will abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to initially load.
- 26. Studies report 50% of traffic online today is being delivered via a CDN.
- 27. Why a CDN? Internet trends have paved the way for the necessity of CDNs for websites big and small. 3.5 billion internet users Content Expansion Video Streaming Mobile Development eCommerce Growth Security
- 32. Good news is, with the implementation of a CDN, a spider-web effect of benefits come along with the technology.
- 33. 60% of consumers will only wait 5 seconds or less for a page to load completely.
- 36. CDN & Security DDoS attacks can go undetected for 4.5 hours on average and then take just as long if not longer to begin to mitigate if safeguards are not already in place. To defend against such attacks at the network layer, there needs to be a process of routing only legitimate traffic through to the site and off loading the initial hit of traffic.
- 37. DNS resolution can account for as much as 29% of initial page load time. Combining and pairing a DNS and CDN solution- allows for maximized performance with a speedy reliable delivery network.
- 38. DNS + CDN Management
- 39. DNS + CDN Management
- 40. DNS + CDN Management
- 41. Google and Amazon find sites suffer a 7% decrease in sales if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Editor's Notes
- Hi, I’m Krystle Herbrandson- Dir of Sales here at Sucuri where I have the great pleasure of leading a group of unique sales people from across the globe. Our Sales teams, aid customers in navigating the landscape of website security. And today we’re going to dive a little deeper into one website performance tool that Caleb mentioned on our previous webinar, CDN’s and how they combined with your site can optimize it for better performance. Next Slide
- A bit about me, I’ve spent much of my career surrounded by technology which has breed my love of gadgets. Having spent about a decade working for a little company called T-Mobile and being a part of it’s growth into the player it is today. I first hand witnessed the evolution of when a phone went being a simple cellular device used to make call to PDAs and the smart phones of today. Along with it the emergence of text & picture messaging, as well as video calling. Over the course of the last decade and a half our phones have gone from black and white pixelated bar phones to what we hold in our hands today a device more powerful than that of the PC of a decade ago. The internet and telecommunications are a similar playground. The internet has seen an increase in capacity in a relatively short period of time. The way in which people are engaging with content has expanded and in turn brought on the mobile revolution. People are expecting a desktop experience in their phone now. Which means your site’s performance and speed in particular should be at the top of mind. I hope you’re ready to learn the ins and outs of website performance acceleration w/ CDNs? Let’s jump into it.. Next Slide
- What we will cover today: Some of the topics are going to be.. Cover 1-3 4. Benefits whether you have a small or a very large site Cover 5. 6. And what layer of security CDN’s provide Cover 7. DNS and CDN management working together. 8. Considerations and complications when adding multiple CDNs/ Caching tools. Cover 9. At then end I hope you’ll walk away with is an understanding of the functionality and associated benefits related to increased performance, high availability and added DDoS protection through the implementation of a CDN.
- So what does CDN or Content Delivery Network represent? All very simple words but when combine make a very fast a speedy network for your site to travel along. Let’s break it down and start at the foundation- ‘N’ network- this represent the distribution of servers, Point of Presence, (PoPs), nodes or edges you name it, they have a lot of different names. Those are all across the globe which work together to provide an efficient traffic system to reliably Deliver webpages and their content to users based on geographical presence and proximity to a “POP”. The network's purpose behind having a distributed system of nodes all working together is to use caching across the network, Caching makes your website content readily available to end users regardless of their distance to the Host server or what we will come to know as our origin server. Essentially, with an optimized use of a network of servers content can be delivered at it's most efficient means possible. Next Slide
- Let’s talk about content When delivering content it’s important to be familiar with the different types available as All content is not created equally. Many of us are familiar with Static , Dynamic And now the move for live streaming. Next Slide
- These are the files that don’t need to be generated, modified or anything additional between the request that the user has and the origin server. This is includes JavaScript, CSS, images, HTML files. And then we move into Dynamic Content Next Slide
- The word is simple in form and transparent in nature. This content is frequently changing and many of times this is what your website does to engage with the user. Including animations, video and audio. Which helped us moving into Streaming Next Slide
- Streaming content is what we are currently experiencing today with Netflix, Hulu, Facebook live, Snap. Streaming is delivered to users a bit differently than we have seen with Static and Dynamic. What we see with this content type is partially downloaded files made available to view while the rest continues to download. What does this mean for you and your website? It means that the slower your site is, and often becomes with the addition of all of this great content, the less people are going to want to stick around if it takes a while to load. The term latency floats around when discussing CDNs and it’s easiest to think of it as that loading screen or the dreaded spinning wheel, you've likely seen before when waiting for something to become available. thus reducing the time it takes for each piece of data to travel from the host server to the user will provide a lower latency and a more optimized user experience. Ultimately helping to avoid drop-offs in users as a result of extended load times and resulting in better conversions. Next Slide 5 minute mark
- Now let’s break it down to the nuts and bolts- technology can get confusing and there are often multiple names for the same thing It’s important to understand the terminology and technology associated with a CDN and we’re going to break it down and start with the basics: Next Slide
- Origin Server- What is this? This is where your websites data is housed. CDNs do not host your site. This is your host!!! The use of origin to describe your host is typical in the space of CDN’s and is more commonly known to site owners as your host- The GoDaddy, BlueHost, SiteGround, WPE, you pick. Next Slide
- Edge Servers- The question “how does a CDN work” cannot be explained without addressing what CDN edge servers are. These can be explained as A PoPs, points of presence, edge nodes and refers to the physical location of where the edge servers are located across the globe. These provide the ability to cache your content and deliver to your end users. Next Slide
- These lovely acronyms stand for: TTFB: What does that even mean? This means that when you are bring up your website and you see the first elements load- usually CSS, some text, static images. But before the rest of the website comes through is what is defined but Time to first byte. This is made up of 3 separate components. The time needed to send the HTTP request The time needed for the server to process the request- hops play a factor The time needed for the server to send back the first byte of the response to the client These are the intricacies of breaking down data. But what happens when we are not robots or computers? What then comes to matter most to users and owners is a full website experience. Total Time is what is used to measure the actual time is takes to completely load a site for the user. If you see that there delta between these two, it’s often caused by geographic distance or connectivity issues. You can use a performance tool to analyze the cause and see where the bottlenecks are and what can be done to better situate yourself for the user experience. Looking for an appropriate CDN that covers the necessary geography and distribution so you can survive spikes in traffic and lower bounce rates. There are three metrics you will hear most when talking: connection time (literally the time it takes to make the first connection to the server - part of the three way handshake), time to first byte (the time it takes for the very first bit of information to present itself on the browser) and the time to last byte (total connection time) or the time it takes for you to actually work with the site.... (think about the little "waiting to load" at the bottom of the browser”) Next Slide 10 minute mark
- Push and Pull Zones- CDNs offer typically 2 methods for delivering content. We will see a Push and Pull Zones Employing the use of the Pull Zone method is the best because typically websites already have a host where files are managed and stored. Content gets pulled automatically from the origin server or Host server to the PoPs / edge node and gets delivered to the visitor via the edge servers based on where they are geographically. It’s also important to understand what the term Next Slide
- Reverse Proxy refers to in relation to a CDN. CDN are focused on the assets of your sites and therefore, the CDN’s servers are able to more quickly deliver content to nearby visitors. Acts as a intermediary between the origin server and those users that are coming to your site. Bringing us to Next Slide
- Caching is a major part of what a CDN does for a website and the implementation. We could spend some time getting into the nuances of caching. But for the purpose of basic understanding, caching is replicating your content data across the network for that Edge servers/ PoPs are able to serve up that content more quickly. Next Slide
- CDN’s are comprised of nodes across a global network, the makeup of servers and nodes varies by CDN. The desired architecture can range from 1000’s of nodes w/ 10 of thousands of servers over various PoPs or a global network with a strategically smaller number of PoPs. For us, it's not about having the most PoP's, but about being configured optimally for our audience, which is most of you. Allows to have traffic routed through our superpop’s and cached at edge servers to provide a fully optimized user experience. Next Slide
- Here you see what many of the CDN providers that started in the 90’s design looks like. It made sense that there was a need for duplication for load balancing and redundancy. It’s about what design and level of maintenance works best for the provider. Technology has sense evolved allowing for different approaches to the design of CDN networks. Both use an Anycast topology to broadcast, but the approach to location and make up of pops and edge servers is different.. What is all comes down to is the focus on total time (time to last byte) as the real metric because that's when the site is useable. What proximities make sense for your user base? Next Slide
- Now let’s see what it looks like for a request to be made to either a site using a CDN and one w/o.. As you can see from the first model… with a CDN your readers get their content faster as it's stored closer to them and the requests have to take less hops and processing time.. We have static content cached at the pops. And conversations that are happening with your origin server or host server are in relation to the dynamic content that needs to be check and severed back up. W/o a CDN- every request that comes to your website- whether it be a bot or and actual user needs to go through the host/ origin server. What that means for performance is where there is only 1 lane to service customers- it often gets backed up and people unwilling to wait leave. {In-n-out reference} Performance is not just about the speed of the responses for your readers, but it's also about alleviating performance issues on your origin servers. Next Slide 15 minute mark
- It all comes down to the user experience. Websites which run slow share a commonality of higher bounce rates and less than desirable ratings with dear friend Google and their algorithms. Google loves speedy sites and hate sluggish ones. Resulting in potential negative impacts to SEO and conversions. When a website visitor requests a site’s content the server closets will respond. What we’re seeing in this picture is what’s happening between the CDN and the originating server. Next Slide
- The user’s request is being directed to a server w/in the CDN that is geographically closets to deliver the cached content. As we can see all nodes have your data cached and thus we are just waiting on the quickest route to win out for the user. While also delivering any content that was not previously cached from the origin. The next requests that come in will then be delivered the cached content available at the servers closest to the web user. Next Slide
- We discussed a lot about the nitty gritty or CDN’s and the terminology and technology that surrounds it. But now let’s get into what it’s means to you the site owner or administrator. What that means specifically is that as Kissmetics found “40% of consumers will abandon a website that take longer than 3 seconds to initially load.” What this all comes down to be Performance optimization!! Let’s face it we’re living in a highly demanding world and that applies to our content as well. In a mobile driven world where attention spans are short, website owners are seeing impacts to revenue, band perception and visitor engagement among just a few directly related to site performance. Regardless of the reason for visiting the site we just don’t want to wait and will look elsewhere to a competitor find it faster. Not all mobile providers are the same and the experience is never consistent, making a responsive site a must. 50% of buyers will start on the mobile device and use more than 2 devices prior to purchase. Next Slide
- CDN technology made its way into use roughly 20 years ago and as the internet and the content we consume has changed so has the CDN. In the 90’s CDNs were reserved primarily for the larger organizations with a budget to support the substantial expense. It was built to deliver static HTLM and downloadable content. The first gen focused on dynamic and static content delivery through replicas, edge computing and networking. As content expanded to multimedia and Video-on-demand it meant that so to did the CDN. The Second generation built upon the focus of performance and added availability with the inclusion of Load balancing were traffic was distributed across the network of servers reducing usage and increasing the guarantee of availability. Pricing for the solution came down but still usage was primarily seen in corporations and business sectors. The third generation or rather the CDN’s of today have continued to build from performance > to performance and availability > to performance, availability and security. And just as we have seen with other technologies as its capacity increases cost decreases, making it available to the masses of sites online. Next Slide 20 minute mark
- CDN’s emerged initially to solve the problem of stresses on networks caused by heavy bandwidth and with the expansion of content the necessity is there. Today, as more aspects of daily life moves online, organizations use content delivery network to accelerate static content, dynamic content, mobile content, ecommerce transactions, video, voice, games and so much more everyday. The CDN market has grown drastically over the last decade and they growth is expected to continue in upwards of 20% YoY. If you haven’t jumped on the CDN band wagon like the 50% of content being delivered today.. Then I hope we started to convince you to start planning. Next Slide
- We’ve ventured in the world where people are constantly connected and tethered to their devices. These are the top 5 contributing factors to the ongoing and upwardly trending success of CDNs.
- These are some interesting facts to consider. Internet Reach: Smartphones helped out as well, as 2 out of 3 adults in USA owns a smartphone. Worldwide, smartphones make up roughly 50 percent of mobile phone users in 2017. We’ve gone from 1 billion internet users to 3.5 billions in the course of a decade. That’s significant growth making CDN’s a necessity for traffic distribution. Next Slide
- Content Expansion: Facebook reported its users watch about 4 billion videos every day, 75 percent of them on a mobile phone. A CDN reduces latency for high bandwidth content like streaming video. It’s an intensely ridiculous amount of video content being consumed but the masses each and everyday. 35% of the world is connected in some way shape or form to the internet. And the US is far exceeding the average- With 1 in 3 people using a smart phone today. Mobile: As users become more sophisticated the expectations for website speed and performance, no matter the device, are higher, as mobile users expect similar web experience to desktop. Next Slide
- eCommerce In the first quarter of 2015, retail ecommerce sites had more than $80 billion in sales, compared to $26.5 billion in the first quarter of 2006. CDNs became an imperative for smooth eCommerce websites.
- Internet security is a huge topic. DDoS attacks are on the rise and seen as one of the most prevalent attack vectors today. A CDN allows you to load balance and alleviate bandwidth from such attacks. New ways of Internet security are being developed; all of which have helped increase the growth of CDNs, as cloud security adds another layer of security. Helping toimprove the security of a website.
- Mobile internet consumption and demand for responsive quick content has pushed the need for global connectivity where time is money. 34% of the globe is connected to the internet how does that translate to an everyday website owner? Everyday users are not concerned or in many cases educated on what it takes to pull in the content and deliver them a great user experience. It’s our job as website owners and administrators to provide an optimized experience. Where they don’t need to see behind the curtain. { Disney reference} "a CDN can improve your websites speed by 60 - 70%” overnight you can double you speed and not leave "your reader stuck waiting for the "Loading"” screen. Depending on where you host, you'll save on bandwidth usage. What’s even better is that the price to entry can be as little as free. Next Slide
- We talked about initial load time needs to come in at 3 seconds are less to keep a user. 60% will leave after 5 seconds if the site is not completely loaded.. We have a 2 second barrier to get the site to partial to complete. Sites that load faster ultimately result in higher satisfaction and consequently increased revenue. CDNs are able to enhance performance to allow for global scalability and ease of deliverability of all forms of content to all devices. All the while protecting against potential DDoS attacks ever so present on the web. Once again reducing network load and costs. Next Slide
- Now that we’ve established the benefits of distributing traffic to provide a global presence for your brand a CDN will help in getting that done for an affordable cost and you don’t need insane traffic to benefit from the use of a CDN. With the increase in importance placed on website performance more and more CDN providers are coming to market. Things to consider when looking for a CDN provider and configuration options are functionality, overall performance, cost and service compatibility. Custom SSL: Be sure to choose a compatible solution if you have a custom SSL for proper configuration. Global Coverage: Check PoPs to ensure coverage of continents and as always key geographical locations for your business. Akamai is known globally to speed up networks and connections. They have a strong infrastructure to speed up sites and make things better for online users. MaxCDN is very well know and been in the space since 2009. Incapsula Inc. The company works with popular sites like Moz, Wix, SIEMENS and others. Next Slide
- Cloudflare- is a U.S company that provides a content delivery network and distributed domain server services sitting between the visitor and the CF user’s hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for websites. Sucuri- Read AWS- Amazon web services, is a collection of clod computing services, also called web services, that make up a platform. These services operate from 12 geographical regions across the world. Make a decision that is based on budget, users and Next Slide
- The statistics around the severity of a DDoS attack are sometimes hard to process for an average website owner and user. Business that rely heavily on the availability of their web properties and thus protecting them from potential compromises requires a multifaceted layered approach. The Amazon’s of the world might suffer losses into the millions because of 1 DDoS attack left unnoticed for 4.5 hours and then mitigated. Since CDNs use surrogate servers located across different data centers in different regions around the globe, this scattered infrastructure provides a more secure network. CDNs are known to absorb less-sophisticated DDoS attacks, simply with bandwidth. With CDNs, you gain the advantage of – size. The overload caused by DDoS attack is processed on different PoPs according to their origin, which helps to prevent server saturation. Many CDN providers will also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. This will result in the decrease of spam and hack attacks. Again, this depends of a service that your CDN provider is offering. Next Slide
- When a user lands on a page, dozens of distinct DNS queries are issued to identify the correct source for all content. DNS or Domain Name System is the naming system used for converting domain names into Internet Protocol or IP address which is how the internet communicates. Information from all the domain name servers across the Internet are gathered together and housed at the Central Registry. Host companies and Internet Service Providers interact with the Central Registry on a regular schedule to get updated DNS information. Which means that if the DNS system goes down consequently the site is not available as well because they are one-in-the same. The Domain name is the human directly and DNS is the computer’s way of looking up the requested information. Having a managed DNS decreases the risk of network failure because they are built as an extremely reliable network with global distrubution. Next Slide
- Together we see improvements to overall performance. Next Slide
- Reliablity Next Slide
- And lastly Availability- Managed DNS services are ideal for companies and brands of all sizes. They offer global footprints and use advanced load balancing and routing techniques to minimize latency, maximize availability, and minimize costs. DNS is the first part of the lookup process. It is essentially what separates online brands from their consumers. If your DNS fails then your brand may as well not exist. Next Slide
- Latency or Resolution Time has been a widely acknowledged consideration for e-retailers focused on end-user experience. Google and Amazon have done studies and show that a 7 % decrease in sales can occur if a site takes more than 3 seconds to load. I know I keep talking about these stats on seconds to load but it really does come down to seconds, that can cost you money. Keep that in mind when moving forward. That it’s 3-5 seconds that a customers takes to decide if your brand is worth it or not. Next Slide
- People often come to us thinking more is better and so it’s important to note that without the knowledge this idea and get overly complicated. In many instances caches will get stuck, users won't know where it is and they have to be cleared in specific order. Most CDN's will work nicely with each other but be mindful of what you're doing and understand it might take some additional time when configuring or troubleshooting. For most, having dual CDN's isn't necessary, but it is possible. The best configuration is if you use a CDN for assets (think video) and one for the site.. in those configurations it's perfect! Next Slide
- Here’s is a list of performance tools that provide options for decreases the sizes of your images, Pingdom can help identify issues for better optimization. Sucuri is always working on adding to our webinars, guides and website tools to help provide a suite of resources for all website owners. Next Slide
- Here are some nice resources that can help you as you navigate this process, we always love what Syed and his team put out on WPBeginner so definitely start there. Hummingbird is also a great performance tool for our WP users. Next Slide
- We’ve covered a lot in our time together including- [List items] Next Slide
- Thank you and we’re ready for questions