All Zmags publications are delivered to readers through a Content Delivery Network (CDN) called Akamai. This brings speed, stability, scalability, security and availability to your online publications. That was a lot of ’bilities, so let’s take a look at how a CDN works and why it’s so valuable.
In essence, a CDN is a huge network of servers and infrastructure. In the case of Akamai, the world’s leading CDN provider, this network consists of more than 34.000 servers in 70 countries, with several thousand servers across the US alone.
Fast delivery of publications
The CDN is placed between Zmags and the readers. Whenever a publication is read, it is fetched from the Akamai network, instead of directly from Zmags. Since servers are placed in 70 countries, there’s a very good chance that this server is closer to the reader than the Zmags headquarters. This ensures a speedy delivery of publications to readers, no matter where they are.
The sheer amount of servers in the network is paramount to the other advantages of CDN: scalability, stability, security and availability.
Eliminating single point of failure
There’s no one single point of failure – if a server goes down, others will step up to the plate and serve the content.
If a sudden huge load occurs – for example, Macy’s launches their Christmas catalog and all of US go online to see it – the network will scale with the job, with no risk of bottle-necks. This is not just an advantage if you are the one with that big publication with millions of readers – for all the small guys this also ensures that their publications are always available, even if a big player has a surge in traffic on the same service.
As for security, CDN provides a defense against Distributed Denial of Service attacks, or DDoS’s. These attacks are frequently reported to be launched by ill-minded people behind botnets, who try to bring down a company by sending enormous amounts of traffic to their service, simply overwhelming it. With a CDN in place, this can both scale to the challenge, plus it has mechanisms to ignore that type of traffic once it has been identified.
CDN is a premium service that comes at a higher cost than “normal” hosting. This is why many of our competitors do not serve their content through a CDN. With Zmags, all your content is automatically hosted through the CDN delivered by Akamai. It’s one of the many reasons why Zmags is at the top of the list of trustworthy and established providers of online publications.
