SiteGround CDN 2.0 Is Here, Now Even Faster!

Website loading speed may have a serious impact on search engine standings, bounce rates and sales conversions of your site. As a web hosting provider we are able to contribute to your website’s success by helping it load faster. That’s why at SiteGround we’re constantly implementing new speed-enhancing technologies that are more powerful and easier to use for our clients. 

One of our latest products, that ensures faster sites for our clients, is our custom-built CDN. Just a few months after its launch, it is already used by hundreds of thousands of domains. We have seen the service has a considerable positive impact on our clients’ website performance and we are also receiving a steady flow of positive feedback from the users.

To improve the service even more, we have just deployed version 2.0 of SiteGround CDN. It employs the power of anycast routing and Google network edge locations and thus increases the website loading speed by 20% on average and may go up to 100% for visitors located in some specific parts of the world. 

Why is the CDN 2.0 faster?

As you probably already know, the idea of the CDN (Content Delivery Network) is to keep a copy of your website on multiple locations called points of presence (PoPs) around the globe. When you have website visitors located far away from the original server that hosts your site, the CDN allows them to see a version of your site from the closest PoP. Thus the time needed for the data to reach your visitors is shorter than if it was served by the original server and your site loads faster. The closer your visitor is to a PoP the shorter the time it takes your site to load.

But apart from the geographical distance between the visitor and the PoP there are, of course, other factors that influence the speed with which the PoP is reached. It makes a difference if the data travels through the public network or through the much faster Google Cloud internal network. 

In our initial CDN setup each PoP had its own unique IP address and required the central DNS system to calculate the distance between users and PoPs, determining the best routing through the public network. Now in the CDN 2.0 we have implemented an anycast layer which ensures that IP addresses remain the same for all our PoPs. This way we eliminate the DNS layer calculations and clients requests are automatically routed to the closest edge location of Google network. Once the request reaches the edge location, it enters the much faster Google Internal network and reaches the closest SiteGround CDN PoP almost instantly. So now the closer your visitors are to the network edge location, the faster your site loads.

The great news is that Google Cloud internal network already has 176 edge locations around the globe, which means that most visitors are always very near one of these. Also whenever new such points are added by Google, they will naturally make our CDN faster in new regions.

What are the benefits of the CDN 2.0?

• Faster sites and better TTFB 

Due to the implementation of the anycast routing and the fact that we are able to take advantage of the extraordinary speed of the Google internal network, now millions of visitors of the sites that use our CDN service will have better experience and have the requested sites load faster.

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a measurement of the time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of response data from a web server after making a request. When comparing the first byte response times from more than 50 locations the TTFB improvement is around 20% on average and up to 100% in regions that were further from the SiteGround’s CDN PoPs.

• Higher CDN reliability 

CDN 2.0 is backed by cross-region load balancing, including automatic multi-region failover which allows them to react instantaneously to changes in users, traffic, network, backend health, and other related conditions. This helps to ensure that the content remains available, even in case any of the CDN PoPs goes down.

How to get the CDN 2.0?

Starting from the middle of February, we will gradually switch both the Free SiteGround CDN users and the Premium SiteGround CDN users to the new version of the service. The process wouldn’t require any action on the client’s end and will be fully automated. If you are still not taking advantage of our CDN, it is a great time to add CDN to your site now through your client area.