As you seek more ways to outperform your competition, ensuring fast online experiences with your Drupal enterprise website is critical. Faster website speeds and page loads have a direct impact on visitor engagement, which in turn enables your sites to fulfill their objectives for increasing conversions and building your brand. Any latency in page loads can lead to frustrated site visitors, missed opportunities and lost revenue.

Acquia Edge CDN, part of the Acquia open digital experience platform, speeds up sites built on the Drupal platform by distributing content across a global network, automatically optimizing the delivery of webpages so visitors get the fastest load times and best performance no matter where they are. 

The benefits of a CDN

For web experiences, latency is the kiss of death. According to Aberdeen, a one-second delay in page load times results in 11% fewer page views, a 16% drop in customer satisfaction and a 7% loss in customer conversations.

A content delivery network, or CDN, can help to significantly improve website speed by copying content from one server and caching multiple versions in servers around the world. When a user requests a webpage, content can be served from the server that is geographically closest to them, significantly speeding page loads. For any content that is not yet been cached, the CDN serves content from the server where the content originated.

In addition to accelerating page load times, a CDN network can help to prevent denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. As these attacks have become cheaper and easier to mount, the frequency of attacks has increased, causing significant damage in loss of reputation and loss of business for customers around the world. When a particular server is under a denial of service attack, a CDN allows content to be served from a variety of other locations, ensuring that visitors can continue to access content and have a positive customer experience despite cyberattacks.

Acquia Edge CDN delivers superior performance

Acquia Edge CDN brings cutting-edge performance improvements to Drupal websites, apps and APIs, speeding up sites by distributing content across the web through a global content delivery network. With Acquia Edge CDN, visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance wherever they are in the world.

Acquia Edge CDN goes beyond traditional CDN offerings, providing modern, SSD-based hardware with flexible caching features and easy implementation. Acquia Edge CDN also optimizes digital experiences delivery for the needs of browsers, bandwidth and devices. Building upon the caching and load-balancing features already included in the Acquia platform, Acquia Edge enables visitors to engage with your content the way it was meant to be experienced.

Acquia Edge CDN provides:

• Faster performance: Acquia automatically optimizes the delivery of Drupal webpages so that visitors get access to their content faster.
• Resilience against attacks: Acquia Edge CDN’s Global Anycast network features 165+ data centers in 75 countries, enabling highly distributed attack traffic to be easily absorbed so your organization can stay online.
• Content optimization: Acquia Edge CDN reduces page load times by up to 50%, decreases bandwidth utilization by up to 60% and lowers the number of requests hitting origin Web servers by up to 65% on average.

With Acquia Edge CDN, we’ve created a best-in-class, global infrastructure from the ground up that uses only next-generation, high-performance equipment. The result: a CDN that’s more affordable, simpler to deploy and ready to outperform any legacy CDN on the market.

Advantages of Acquia Edge CDN 

Acquia Edge CDN’s performance offers dramatically improved load times for static and dynamic web content. With fewer hops and lower latency, a request on our CDN network takes less than 23 milliseconds to serve, on average.

Acquia Edge also offers superior security capabilities. Acquia Edge inspects traffic by operating as a reverse proxy, and the network equipment comprising our CDN is fully owned and operated by Acquia, ensuring that security is built into every layer and every protocol.

A massively horizontally scaled architecture enables every node to perform DNS requests, performance transformations and security checks. Additionally, our Anycast routing ensures web users are automatically routed around any failures to their nearest data center, providing reliable, high-performance service.

Additional solutions from Acquia Edge

Acquia Edge provides a number of additional solutions and add-ons that include:

• Acquia Edge Protect, a solution for protecting your sites from business-halting DDoS attacks and data breaches with a proven web application firewall, a single SAN certificate per domain and a network capacity that’s 15 times larger than the largest DDoS attack ever recorded.
• Argo Smart Routing reduces latency by 35% on average with Waze-like packet traffic routing.
• Quickstart provides experts to help get Acquia Edge provisioned, configured and onboarded quickly.
• Workers lets developers run custom code in a server-less environment at the edge to deliver unmatched performance and security.
• Authentication uses popular identity providers to centrally manage access with security policies and logging.
• China CDN optimizes Internet experiences while in China across 25 mainland Chinese data centers.
• Rate Limits provides customize rule sets, granular controls to detect bad traffic and insights to improve security posture.
• Load Balancing provides technology for geo-steering, monitoring and failover for Internet-facing infrastructure to enhance service availability. 

FAQs: what is Acquia Edge CDN?

What is a CDN?

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that delivers content from websites to visitors based on their geographic location to increase page load speeds. A CDN copies and caches content to a global network of servers in geographically different locations.  When a visitor requests a webpage or web content, the content is delivered by the server closest to the visitor, helping to achieve constantly fast page load times. 

What is Acquia Edge CDN?

Acquia Edge CDN is a CDN that goes beyond traditional solutions to not only bring content closer to site visitors, but to optimize content for device, browser and bandwidth needs. Acquia Edge CDN is part of Acquia’s open digital experience platform, a solution built for Drupal that enables organizations to build, run and optimize Drupal sites more quickly and effectively. Acquia is an open source company founded by the creator of Drupal to provide infrastructure, support and services for organizations creating Drupal-based experiences.