HomeArticleHow Many CDN PoPs Should I Have?
article-image

03 June 2022

How Many CDN PoPs Should I Have?

Most people think that the more Content Delivery Network (CDN) servers a company has, the better its services will be. But that isn't always the case. This is because there are many requirements that you must consider to determine the amount of CDN that a company needs. 

These requirements include the type of content, the region served, and the Point of Presence (PoP) data centers. But before delving more into CDN PoPs, let's take a quick look at what they are and how they improve your business!

What is a CDN, and how does it Work? 

A CDN is a collection of interconnected servers to distribute content and data from an origin server worldwide. It stores the content and brings it closer to where every end-user is. CDN helps speed up the internet content accessibility from web-enabled devices or browsers. 

CDN services were developed to address the issue of network congestion generated by providing rich online content such as graphics and video across the internet — similar to a traffic jam. This is because it took too long to get material from centrally situated servers to individual users. The content includes text, images, scripts, and media files. 

CDNs may also provide improved protection for websites against cybercriminals and security issues such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) threats.

Is Having More PoPs Better for My Business? 

As mentioned earlier, the amount of PoPs you need for your business depends on your service type. For example, if you are dealing with caching servers, having few but high-performance data centers will most likely be good. 

See it this way. When you have many PoPs and users try to access the content, they will be redirected to the PoP near them. If the requested content is new, it will be routed to the central server. This leads to higher latency, which makes more PoPs less beneficial. 

Another reason for fewer, bigger CDN PoPs is data storage capacity. In a smaller data center, there will be less storage capacity to cache data, so they will be unable to serve all data queries. On the other hand, a bigger data center will most likely be able to cache anything the local user is seeking for. When the delay of first-time requests is combined with the capacity of more oversized CDN PoPs, it is easy to see why having fewer, high-capacity CDN PoPs is a preferable strategy. 

How Can You Benefit from Many PoPs? 

The fact behind the multi-PoPs strategy is straightforward. Not utilizing a CDN is undoubtedly out of the question for many company executives and website owners. Still, many individuals and corporations discover that working with many providers is often a CDN approach that offers better results. In addition, different CDN providers deliver varying outcomes. As a result, large organizations with massive online followings rely on a multi-PoPs strategy to ensure their global audience regularly reads their content. 

Here are some other ways you can benefit from having many PoPs;

● Higher distribution reach of your content 

● Offer more specialties for different types of content 

● Better pricing for different regions 

● Offers better geo-localized performance. 


While having many PoPs can benefit your business, it doesn't always guarantee good results. It can be much better to have a few high-capacity CDNs that can store more data and have less latency. 


Is this information helpful?

Related Article