Programming Terminology

CDN

Related to: Server

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It's usually for delivering web assets in an efficient way.

The main idea is to create a network of servers around the world that all host your web assets so that the end users visiting your website don't all have to download your assets from one place. Imagine if your website user is on another continent which is different from where your one server is. Their experience will be a little slow because of how far away they are when they need to download your website assets. A CDN is like having copies of various assets sent to different servers all over the world and then when someone needs to download them, they will automatically be connected to the nearest server.

Often times third part tools will use CDN's. Not every asset you use for your website is going to be something you personally made. A good example might be icons. If you want to use icons on your website, you can make your own and self-host them. But then you'd have to make your own CDN which can be time consuming and expensive if you wanted users to have a super fast experience on your website. Instead of doing all that, you can use third party icons like GitHub'sPrimer Octicons. They have a CDN so you can include their icons with your website:


<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <title>Document</title>
  <link href="https://unpkg.com/@primer/css@^16.0.0/dist/primer.css" rel="stylesheet" />
  <!-- CDN URL 👆🏻 -->
</head>
<body>
  
</body>
</html>

Usually these third part tools and their CDN's are free and you can use them without even making an account. You literally just copy that line of code and you can use it on your site.

Another free CDN I like is Google Fonts for custom fonts on your website