What is Cloudflare CDN

The core and main feature of the Cloudflare service is its CDN functionality. The abbreviation stands for Content Delivery Network and as the name suggest, it is used for distributing content across multiple locations around the globe.

These locations are considered the backbone of the service as they enable users near them to load a website from that location instead of the hosting server that might be thousands of miles away. As you probably already know, the distance between a web host and a user plays a significant role when it comes to loading speeds. The further away you are from the host the longer the website will take to fully render in your browser. You can try this for yourself by opening a website from a country across the globe.

Fortunately, Cloudflare's locations, the CDN network, solves that inconvenience!

How Exactly Does the CDN Work?

We already mentioned that the CDN service distributes content across multiple data centers worlwide. Great, but what does that actually mean?

Fortunately, the explanation is very simple. When you add a website to the Cloudflare network it automatically caches a copy of it on each one of the aforementioned locations. To be more precise the network caches only your website's static elements: CSS, HTML, Javascript, etc. The dynamic elements still load from your web hosting server. That is necessary since such elements are typically loaded only after specific code is executed on the hosting server itself. You might ask yourself why Cloudflare does not cache dynamic content as well, though.

The answer to that question is also rather straightforward. Let us take a weather website as an example. When two users from vastly different parts of the globe open it they will see the same layout since that is cached in static files such as HTML. Cloudflare can serve those without issue to different users because static files are always the same. However, on the website, the two users will see different values for the weather at their specific location: temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. All of those values are served after the user's browser makes a request to the hosting server, which executes the necessary code. Such content cannot be easily served to multiple users and is therefore not cached.

Despite that, however, websites will still experience an increase in their loading speed because those static files usually take up the most space. Therefore, they take longer to fully load and render. Compound distance to the server on top of that and you can see why caching static elements in data centers around the globe is useful.

Caching static elements has another upside, too.

Cloudflare Saves Bandwidth

Because Cloudflare serves cached static elements from its own servers that means the web hosting server does not need to serve them each time they are requested. That in turn cuts down on the amount of bandwidth the website uses which is always a good thing, especially if you are in a shared hosting environment.

On a typical shared hosting server you should try to keep your website's resource usage as low as possible, and that includes bandwidth. Excessive resource usage from one user can negatively impact everyone on that server. Fortunately, most modern shared hosting servers have ways of handling such users or websites so the rest do not suffer slowness or downtime. These ways typically include suspending the account or website that is using more than they are allotted. That is why Cloudflare is a good way to reduce the amount of bandwidth your website uses and keep it under whatever quotas your web host may have for its shared hosting servers.

We strongly encourage you look into Cloudflare if you have visitors from around the globe or your website is using up too much bandwidth.