The Benefits of Contentstack’s CDN

For most web properties, delivering content fast is of the utmost importance. That’s why Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) exist.

A CDN is a network of caching servers scattered across the globe, caching content regularly and delivering cached content to nearby requests. This improves the content delivery and page load time dramatically since the request does not need to travel to the origin server. Read more about CDN.

Most website owners consider setting up a CDN. But with Contentstack as your CMS, you don’t need to worry about setting up any caching mechanism since Contenstack comes with a CDN. Lightning-fast content delivery comes by default. Let’s look at some of the other CDN benefits that you get with Contentstack.

Leverage our CDN to serve high traffic

We have partnered with a modern CDN provider with more than 60 cache servers worldwide, capable of delivering cached content in a fraction of a second.

Additionally, there is no maximum limit to the number of GET requests per second you can make to the CDN. This means you do not need any caching mechanism or CDN, even if your website gets incredibly high traffic per day.

In cases when Contentstack is down, which doesn’t happen, the CDN servers will continue to deliver cached content to the visitors.

Keep your content fresh with Cache Purging

Purging refers to the removal of cached content from the CDN servers. Your cached content remains in the Contentstack CDN servers for up to one year, after which it is cleared automatically. However, whenever any content is published, unpublished, or deleted, it purges the changed content (and some related content such as referred entries and assets) from the CDN servers instantly. Read about how cache purging works with Contentstack.

After the cache is purged, when making subsequent page requests, the CDN fetches new content from the origin server, delivers to the requester, and saves the updated cache. This process ensures that your website visitors always get updated, fresh content.

If an asset or image is updated, the cache is not purged. The updated asset or image gets a new URL, and the old image or asset would be available at the previous URL for one year.

Near Realtime Cache Purging

Cache purging happens in realtime. When any new content is published, unpublished, or deleted, the cache is purged instantly. So, subsequent requests are updated from the origin server.

Cache Optimized for Fewer Requests to the Origin Server

Contentstack’s intelligent caching mechanism purges the cache of only the content that has been changed (published, unpublished, or deleted) and other related content (e.g., referenced entries and assets) from the CDN servers. Also, the cache of only that specific locale and environments are purged.

Purging happens for only the cached items that are changed. The cache of other unchanged content remains intact. This translates into a lower number of requests to the origin server. You can refer to our Cache Purging Scenarios doc for more details.

Maintenance-free and Economical

Having a CDN within your CMS means you don’t have to worry about choosing a CDN from the hundreds of available options, setting it up, and maintaining it forever.

Nor do you have to worry about the CDN being compatible with the CMS or defining cache purging rules, etc. It’s all set up and ready to use. Additionally, this is much more cost-effective than another third-party CDN, even if you use and pay for over-usage with Contentstack.

From the above points, it is undoubtedly clear that you do not need a separate CDN for your web properties if you use Contentstack as your CMS. However, if you still want to set up a separate CDN (or if you already have one), there are certain things to keep in mind when using Contentstack. Using other CDNs is a topic that we will cover in our follow-up CDN blog post.