What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a content delivery network (CDN)? [closed]

Question

I was going through Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site from developer site of Yahoo...

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a content delivery network (CDN)?

• When to use a CDN?

• Is a CDN a performance booster?

Answer 1

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a content delivery network (CDN)?

• The disadvantages may be that it costs money, and it adds a bit of complexity to your deployment procedures.

• The main advantage is an increase in the speed with which the content is delivered to the users.

When to use a CDN?

• It will be most effective when you have a popular public website with some type of static content (images, scripts, CSS, etc.).

Is a CDN a performance booster?

• In general, yes. When a specific request is made by a user, the server closest to that user (in terms of the minimum number of nodes between the server and the user) is dynamically determined. This optimizes the speed with which the content is delivered to that user.

Answer 2

One other item to consider (that has recently been thrust upon us): Your clients may block the CDN! I'm using Microsoft's CDN for jQuery and last fall we chnaged from the microsoft.com host name to ajax.aspnetcdn.com (to avoid the unneeded cookies when downloading jQuery). Since then we have had several customers with network filters that blocked aspnetcdn.com and had to manually whitelist it.

We will continue to use the CDN, but it opened our eyes to yet another problem it could cause.