Content Delivery Network (CDN) Integration for Drupal Hosting
Building a successful website involves more than just coming up with a good idea and creating some content around it. Your site must also be quick, secure, and easy to use if it stands any chance of beating the competition. Speaking of competition, you need to get people to visit your project in the first place, which means you have to take the necessary steps to climb your way up the search engine results pages.
How do you do that?
Picking the right content management system (CMS) is an excellent place to start. Drupal has been among the most popular platforms of this kind for decades now, so few people will argue that it’s not good enough.
With the CMS in place, you can implement a few techniques to improve the loading speeds and user experience. Integrating a content delivery network (CDN) is one of the first things you can do. Today, we’ll see how a CDN will affect your Drupal website and hosting environment.
Introduction to Content Delivery Networks
To understand the purpose of a CDN, we must first see how your website works without one. In short, you have a single production server delivering data to all visitors. The server may be a physical or a virtual machine, but in either case, it’s situated in a data center somewhere in the world. The site data has to make the journey between the data center and the user’s device.
It’s not exactly a straightforward trip, either. The information passes through multiple routers, switches, and other networking devices before it can be displayed on the screen. The larger the distance between the data center and the user’s screen, the more equipment your site’s files have to go through before they reach the browser.
This means your site’s performance isn’t consistent for all users. For example, imagine your production server is located in San Francisco. If you go to Los Angeles and try to load the site, it will pop up on your screen reasonably quickly. However, if you try to access it from New York, you’ll see a more sluggish performance. Fly to Europe, and the loading speeds will be even slower.
That’s why, more often than not, when you’re signing up for a hosting account, you get to choose where to deploy it. You usually have at least two or three options, and the idea is to pick the one closest to your site’s visitors.
That’s not really possible if you have a global audience. When users from all corners of the planet try to access your site, some will inevitably need to wait for the data to travel halfway across the world before it reaches their screens. Unless, of course, you use a content delivery network.
A CDN service gives you access to a network of servers (called edge servers or edge nodes) spread across multiple geographical regions. Usually, these networks span continents, so you can have one server in the US, a second one in Brazil, a third one in Germany, a fourth in India, and a fifth in South Africa.
The CDN provider copies some of your site’s data and puts it on all its edge servers. In that sense, using a content delivery network is a bit like caching. However, instead of having a single copy of the site’s data stored in the server’s memory, you have multiple copies situated on machines spread across the globe.
When visitors access the website, the data cached by the CDN is served from the location closest to them. So, in our example, visitors from North America get the data from the US data center, users from Europe will be served by the German location, those in Asia by the one in India, etc.
The CDN doesn’t eliminate the need for a primary production server. Your hosting account still hosts the Drupal core and the database, and it’s responsible for handling various requests and processes. However, the volume of data it serves is significantly reduced.
That’s how a CDN works. But how does it help your Drupal project?
Benefits of Using a CDN For Your Drupal Website
The idea of using a global network of servers would be an unnecessary complication if it weren’t for a few crucial advantages. Let’s take a closer look.
- Better performance
The most obvious advantage of employing a content delivery network is the faster performance. The data cached by the CDN is always served from a data center close to the user. There’s less networking equipment to go through, and it arrives more quickly. The performance is consistent for everyone, so people in all corners of the world know exactly what to expect from your site.
- An opportunity to expand your business globally
The internet is a global phenomenon, but it doesn’t automatically let your business span borders and continents. If you want to reach and retain a worldwide audience, you need to make sure everyone enjoys the same user experience regardless of their location. Your first steps towards this include implementing a CDN.
- Lower hosting fees
A CDN’s impact on server resource usage depends on the nature of your Drupal website and its data. However, regardless of what the content delivery network is being tasked with caching, the load on the production server is bound to go down. This means you can expand your website’s popularity without upgrading your hosting account as often as you normally would. In addition to this, a CDN will help you reduce bandwidth usage, which can further help you save some cash.
- Improved security
Virtually all CDN providers package their services with an SSL certificate, as well as tons of features designed to encrypt the data traveling between your hosting server and the content delivery network’s edge nodes. Your CDN provider won’t make you invincible, but it can give you extra peace of mind.
- No downtime in case of an attack
The infrastructure controlled by a CDN provider is massive. We’re talking hundreds of servers that can absorb vast volumes of traffic without any performance drops. This could be especially handy if your site is targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Because the CDN’s edge nodes serve a lot of the data, fewer requests reach your primary hosting server, so it’s much less likely to be overwhelmed by the wave of junk traffic. Furthermore, many CDN providers offer additional features that improve your chances of coming out from the ordeal intact.
- Higher search engine rankings
The benefits we’ve discussed so far lead to a better overall user experience. The user experience plays a vital role in determining your site’s position on the search engine results pages. A good ranking requires impeccable security, excellent uptime stats, and consistent performance across the globe. So, a CDN lets you kill several birds with one stone.
How to Pick The Right CDN Service
There are many differences between the CDN services available on the market, but providers generally try to ensure they cater to as many projects as possible. Given how many websites use Drupal, it should be no surprise that all content delivery networks work well with the CMS.
This means you need to look at other factors when deciding which CDN provider you’ll use. Here are the three main ones:
- Server locations
You need a clear idea of what your target audience is. Think about what sort of people you’ll try to reach and determine where most of them live. If you’re trying to attract visitors from all corners of the world, you’ll want a CDN service with a relatively even worldwide distribution of data centers. On the other hand, if most of the people you want to reach are located in Europe, the concentration of points of presence in that particular continent will be more important.
- Features
No two CDN services are the same. The competition between providers is stiff, and they try to outdo each other by offering a range of tools and features that guarantee excellent security, reliable performance, and a better overall user experience. Some of these features will be very useful for you, and others won’t be handy at all. It’s up to you to ensure your content delivery network gives you what you need.
- Pricing policy
Using a CDN can help you reduce your hosting fees by lowering the volume of data your production server has to deliver. However, you have to ensure the savings aren’t offset by the price you’ll pay for the CDN itself. Have a good look at the pricing options, check out what providers offer, and try to pick the one that won’t put too much pressure on your budget.
Popular CDN Providers For Drupal Websites
It’s impossible to single out one CDN provider as superior to all others. The market offers a wide range of services provided by companies with different business models. It’s important to sift through the options and shortlist those suitable for your needs.
When doing your research, you’ll likely start with the most widely used ones. Here are some of the providers you’ll probably bump into in no particular order:
- Cloudflare
Cloudflare is the first name most website developers think of when they hear about CDN implementation. Part of the reason for this is that it’s well-integrated with many web hosting control panels and server management platforms. The rest is down to the fact that it’s one of the most widely used services of its kind. With over 300 locations in more than 100 countries and 7 million websites using it, Cloudflare is definitely suitable for projects of all shapes and sizes.
- Akamai
Akamai may not be quite as popular as Cloudflare, but it also has points of presence in more than 130 countries, so its global coverage is pretty significant. In addition to access to its network, Akamai offers a range of products that should help you with performance optimization, media and file delivery, and monitoring and testing.
- KeyCDN
With around 50 locations, KeyCDN’s network isn’t quite as big. To compensate for this, they promise you powerful hardware, a range of security and performance features, and innovative technologies that allow you to accelerate your site’s content delivery with a few easy clicks. Image processing and video streaming tools make KeyCDN’s service particularly suitable for multimedia-dependent projects.
- Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is operated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the world’s biggest cloud computing provider. In light of this, it’s no surprise that with over 600 points of presence on six continents, it’s a market leader in terms of network size. It boasts intelligent network mapping and routing, data compression and encryption features, and video streaming capabilities. Of course, being run by AWS, it’s easily integrated with other Amazon cloud services and offers a cost-efficient pay-as-you-go pricing model.
- Fastly
With around 80 locations, Fastly’s network of edge servers is significantly smaller than Amazon’s. This doesn’t mean it’s not suitable for your project, though. In fact, one of the many websites using Fastly’s CDN services is Drupal.org. Drupal’s developers like Fastly’s custom implementation of the Varnish caching engine, which enables the CDN to cache dynamic as well as static data.
Implementing a CDN on Your Drupal Website
The exact steps for integrating your Drupal website into a content delivery network depend on a number of factors. The list of things you should consider before you start varies from project to project, but in most cases, the main differences lie in the CDN provider and the hosting setup.
For example, using Cloudflare on a SPanel server is fairly simple. Unlike other providers, Cloudflare offers a free version of its CDN service. Indeed, some of the features available in the premium tiers are missing, but it’s an excellent way to accelerate your site’s loading speeds without any extra outlay.
The first step is to set up a Cloudflare account, log in to the Cloudflare dashboard, and go to https://dash.cloudflare.com/profile/api-tokens. Click Create Token, pick the Edit zone DNS template, and in the Permissions section, select the following configuration:
Zone / Zone / Edit
Zone / DNS / Edit
Zone / Zone Settings / Edit
Zone / Cache Purge / Purge
User / User Details / Read
In the Zone Resources section, change the Specific zone option to All zones.
Click Continue to Summary and confirm your choice by pressing the Create Token button. You’ll see a string of symbols that represent your Cloudflare API token. Its job is to enable SPanel to interact with Cloudflare’s API and integrate the CDN service on your site with minimum intervention on your part.
Copy the token and log into the SPanel User Interface. Open the Cloudflare utility located under the Tools section on the homepage, select your domain from the drop-down menu on the left, and click Enable Cloudflare. Paste the API token in the respective field and click Activate.
SPanel will send your domain’s DNS zone to Cloudflare, automatically making the required adjustments to the existing records and enabling the content delivery network for your website.
If you use another provider, the steps are a bit different. The procedure depends on the CDN itself, but it always starts with signing up for the service. Then, you can go to Drupal.org and search through the modules to see if there’s an add-on you can install and enable that will tweak your site and make it work with the CDN. For example, if you use Fastly, there’s a module that can easily integrate the content delivery network with your website.
If there’s no extension specifically designed for your provider, the CDN module will take care of the configuration.
Conclusion
While most people associate content delivery networks with loading speeds, it turns out that they can help with many other aspects of your project’s development. In fact, a CDN could end up playing a significant role in helping your project grow and achieve the goals you’re after.
Drupal works well with all content delivery networks, and given the innumerable benefits, it makes no sense to run your website without one.
FAQ
Q: How do I integrate a CDN into my Drupal Hosting setup?
A: There are two options. If your web hosting control panel supports the CDN provider you use, you likely have a tool that will enable the network on your site in a few easy steps. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to look for a Drupal module to help you set everything up.
Q: Do I need a CDN for my website?
A: The websites that stand to gain the most from a content delivery network are those visited by users from all corners of the globe. However, given the additional security and reliability benefits most CDNs give you, even the owners of smaller-scale projects with regional reach should consider employing such a service.
Q: Can a CDN improve website performance?
A: Integrating a CDN alone can’t optimize your site or speed up your primary hosting server. However, the addition of edge nodes spread across the globe will reduce the latency and ensure more consistent performance for everybody.
