What’s not to love about content delivery networks (CDN)? They can reduce traffic on your website, save bandwidth and ultimately save you money. Despite the obvious benefits, there are also some drawbacks. What follows are some pros and cons of content delivery networks.
Pros
1. Save Bandwidth – Loading media content like imagines, video and animations can use up a lot of your website’s precious bandwidth. A content delivery network can help you save on data transfer.
2. Higher availability – One of the benefits of CDNs is distributed data centers around the world. This means that your content is more highly available to your visitors, which leads to number 3 on the list: speed.
3. Speed – Because CDNs use strategically geographically dispersed data centers and offload some of the CPU and RAM power from your servers, the overall experience can be faster.
Cons
1. Third-party hosting – By moving some of your content to a third party, you have essentially created an extra host you need to trust to stay up and keep your content safe.
2. Complexity – It is more complicated to load content from a source other than your own server. Although some add-ons for WordPress and other content management systems might make it easier to setup, it is still not as simple as hosting your content yourself.
3. Cost vs. Savings – Does the cost of a CDN outweigh the amount you save on bandwidth? This is a question you need to ask if you are paying for a CDN.
If you can live with giving up a little of your hosting freedom to a CDN and are not concerned about complexity, a content management system may very well be a good way for you to speed up your site and take some load off your server.