// Tutorial //

What is a CDN?

Published on December 16, 2020
What is a CDN?

A content delivery network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers optimized to deliver static content to end users. This static content can be almost any sort of data, but CDNs are most commonly used to deliver web pages and their related files, streaming video and audio, and large software packages.

A CDN consists of multiple points of presence (PoPs) in various locations, each consisting of several edge servers that cache assets from an origin, or host server. The CDN routes user requests to the nearest edge server, which then serves users the appropriate content. If, however, the edge server does not have the assets cached or the cached assets have expired, the CDN will fetch and cache the latest version from either another nearby CDN edge server or your origin servers.

This allows geographically dispersed users to minimize the number of hops needed to receive static content, fetching the content directly from a nearby edge’s cache. The result is significantly decreased latencies and packet loss, faster page load times, and drastically reduced load on your origin infrastructure.

For more resources about CDNs, please visit:

A complete list of our caching-related tutorials, questions, and other educational resources can be found on our CDN tag page.

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about us


About the authors

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
Leave a comment


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

card icon
Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Sign up
card icon
Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We’d like to help.

Learn more
card icon
Become a contributor

You get paid; we donate to tech nonprofits.

Learn more
Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow – whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more ->
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel
Get started for free

Enter your email to get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.

New accounts only. By submitting your email you agree to our Privacy Policy.

© 2023 DigitalOcean, LLC.