Not long ago we launched a centralized DNS service that made DNS management on SiteGround really easy and significantly increased the resolution speed and domain redundancy for SiteGround customers compared to using local DNS servers. Our centralized DNS also laid the foundation for another essential feature for site speed and performance: our cloud-based CDN (Content Delivery Network): SiteGround Cloud CDN.
Why did we develop SiteGround Cloud CDN?
For the past 10 years, we have partnered with CDN providers to offer a free built-in CDN as part of our hosting services. However, third-party services inevitably require additional setup and linkedin database configuration, which often involves managing from separate interfaces or technical knowledge about DNS, HTTP, cookies, etc. Additionally, using third-party services can sometimes cause confusion or issues for users that are outside of our control. And as you know, at SiteGround we have always strived to minimize issues for our customers as much as possible.
That's why we wanted to create our CDN solution to provide a simple On/Off service with smart defaults and native SiteGround server performance. SiteGround Cloud CDN is developed specifically for our customers to incorporate all the services needed to achieve the best results:
Intelligent Anycast DNS to direct traffic to the geographically closest CDN location
Greater control over backend hosting servers to increase redundancy and provide more out-of-the-box functionality
Greater flexibility to configure everything for our customers without them having to do anything
What are the advantages of SiteGround Cloud CDN over a third-party service?
Cloud-native performance
Our new CDN service is entirely hosted in the cloud: clusters of highly available and redundant servers in different regions, allowing us to cache and replicate your content in multiple locations and serve your site visitors with minimal latency. The CDN works with our centralized DNS and its Anycast routing technology to direct requests from your site visitors to the nearest SiteGround CDN location. It will then serve the content from cache to our cloud CDN (if the specific content was previously cached) or serve it to your site’s hosting server ensuring near-native server performance.
Specific positions with a premium network
We have carefully analyzed the top sources of site traffic to our servers and created the following list of locations that currently feed our CDN network: Tokyo (Japan), Singapore, Sydney (Australia), Warsaw (Poland), Hamina (Finland), London (England), Frankfurt (Germany), Eemshaven (Netherlands), Council Bluffs (Iowa, USA), Moncks Corner (South Carolina, USA), The Dalles (Oregon, USA), Los Angeles (California, North America).
Having cloud CDN servers in the above locations gives us a huge advantage in terms of network performance. The fact that we have control of the network at both the CDN layer and your site's hosting server makes communication between them incredibly fast. By using internal paths between servers we eliminate any delays and latency that might be seen with third-party CDN providers that use the public network to communicate with your site's hosting server. In short, this ensures the fastest private network between our CDN locations and our shared hosting servers, resulting in faster loading speeds for our customers.
Simple management and no configuration
Thanks to the fact that every layer of our system – hosting environment, site management panel, centralized DNS – is developed in-house, we can provide our clients with an easy and convenient way to add a CDN layer to their sites literally with one click. It also allows us to implement the CDN features you need and make them available in an easy-to-use interface right inside the SiteGround control panel: Site Tools.