It looks as if the end of net neutrality is upon us. On December 14th, 2017, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to repeal net neutrality regulations that ensured internet service providers (ISPs) treated all internet traffic equally. Essentially this decision has freed giants like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T to be the gatekeepers for what websites and online services consumers have access to, and how quickly they can access them.
For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), this could be a big problem. The end of net neutrality means that ISPs now have the power to create “fast lanes” and “slow lanes”, charging businesses a fee to avoid their sites suffering from slow load times and poor user experience. After all, users can be quick to drop off when a site starts loading slowly.
Luckily, the technology community has been scrambling to find digital solutions to help businesses dodge this fate. And one of the most exciting digital solutions that can help combat this problem is Cloudflare CDN.
What is Cloudflare CDN?
Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN)—a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide the fast delivery of Internet content. Cloudflare has data centers at strategic locations across the globe that assure protection against various types of congestion and slowdown.
This global distribution means a reduction in the distance between users and website resources. With Cloudflare in place, users can connect to the nearest data center instead of solely relying on the website’s original server. Cloudflare also reduces the amount of data transferred by reducing file size through compression.
Additionally, the CDN also acts as a failsafe by making sure that hardware failures, traffic spikes, and malicious attacks don’t bring down your web server and prevent users from having access at all times. Network traffic is evenly distributed across several servers, a technique called load balancing—and even if one or more servers fail for any reason, intelligent failover means that service won’t be interrupted.
Can Cloudflare Help Your Business?
For businesses concerned about being shut out by bigger companies paying their ISP more, Cloudflare CDN may be the answer. It can improve your website loading times, reduce bandwidth costs, increase content availability, and even improve website security. What’s more, it allows for the quick transfer of assets crucial to loading web content for HTML pages, javascript files, images, and videos—so your business, and its website, can keep running smoothly.
This proprietary technology was built to adapt and integrate emerging technologies continuously, so you’ll always be able to stay one step ahead. At Liqui-Site, we offer Cloudflare plans to help our clients combat any slowdowns the future might hold. To find out more, contact us today.
