CDN services in Africa
We might not be aware of it, but we interact with content delivery networks (CDN) daily when we engage with online content. Whether you are reading an article on a news site, doing online shopping, catching up on social media feeds, watching videos on YouTube, or binge-watching a series on Netflix – there are CDNs behind the delivery of such content. CDN services in Africa are getting very important.
CDNs are specifically designed to solve network latency, which is the delay often experienced when loading a web page until the content finally appears on your device screen. The delay can be affected by several factors, but the duration will always be impacted by the actual physical distance between the website’s hosting server and the person trying to access the content. Given Africa’s digital divide and low population of internet penetration, CDN options used to be located in continents with high internet usage. However, this has changed with a boost in internet usage in Africa with the introduction of accessible mobile devices and expanded mobile networks. This, in turn, has catapulted CDN providers into recognizing the opportunities that exist for CDN networks in Africa.
How does a CDN work?
To shorten the distance between a website visitor and the site’s server, a CDN stores cached versions of content in different locations known as points of presence, or POPs. Individual POPs contain several caching servers responsible for delivering content to visitors in the proximity of the POP. In a nutshell, a CDN stores your content in different locations at the same time to ensure that users have quick access to it. For example, if someone in the US were to access your website in South Africa, it would be done through a local US POP instead of the request and your site responses having to travel all the way between the continents. The better your content loading speeds are, the greater your User Experience (UX) will be, and your network resource utilization will also be more effective.
