glossary2 min read

What is a CDN?

CDNs serve your content from servers near your users for faster loading. Learn how they work.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a global network of servers that caches and delivers your website content from locations geographically close to your users. Instead of every request traveling to your origin server (which might be in Virginia), users in Tokyo get content from a server in Tokyo, users in London from a server in London. This reduces latency from 200-500ms to 10-50ms for static assets. Popular CDNs include Cloudflare (which Toolular uses), Fastly, CloudFront, and Akamai.