Even if you work with the best CDN provider, no one can guarantee you exceptional performance across all chosen geographies all the time. Besides, some users lack control over content delivery network, which can be crucial. Therefore, some companies opt for hybrid CDN delivery and start building private DIY CDN networks on the basis of a third-party CDN. Although it sounds like a challenging task, slow performance and downtime can destroy any website and business, so this solution can be very beneficial. Hybrid CDN content delivery approach allows optimizing performance within the infrastructure you create, control and adjust it to ensure the highest reliability, flexibility, and exceptional user experience. CDN providers and tech experts highlight four major benefits of a hybrid CDN.

Constant availability and risk distribution

When online services lie in the base of your business, website downtime means serious loss of conversion and clients’ loyalty. Therefore, you need to ensure 100% availability of your website. Combining a private CDN solution with third-party CDN will help you to avoid failures entirely. If a third-party CDN network goes down for some reasons, a DIY CDN will work with traffic and deliver content. Risks can be managed more efficiently, when you assemble your own private CDN and implement a hybrid CDN that gives better insight into what’s happening with your site in real time. This way, you will spot and solve issues before they strike: troubleshooting is fast and easy.

Performance improvement

There is no one-size-fits-all solution, therefore none of these tools is efficient to solve complex problems separately. So if you need ultimate performance gains, you should leverage a private CDN on top of a third-party CDN to make sure that you use the best-performing CDN elements in real time, and can handle both regular and surging traffic flows. It also gives you the opportunity to deliver content from the PoP located as close to your target region as possible, which allows reaching the fastest content delivery.

Scalability and control

With a hybrid CDN approach you can have better control over traffic and content. With a specifically built CDN infrastructure for the needs of your business you may direct traffic to third-party CDN nodes, or your private CDN nodes to reach the highest performance and efficiency. This business and application logic will be as close to your customers as possible. Additionally, you get better control over the cost of services. With a private CDN solution you enjoy better scalability, and expenses don’t rise because of capacity, but rather depending on the number of requests and nodes. This peculiarity makes significant difference, if you serve heavy content (for instance, high resolution video) and require more bandwidth. Therefore, a hybrid solution means managing content without extra expenses and control over bandwidth cost.

Security

Another part of content control is ensuring its security. Some content owners are not satisfied with third-party CDN solutions that don’t seem optimal enough for security. Together with mentioned limits of renting resources a user also has to let proprietary content be transferred across someone else’s infrastructure, which eliminates the level of privacy and security needed by some companies. A private cloud infrastructure may provide extra protection against DDoS attacks and other threats, because with a hybrid CDN network your content is not on a public network. If you have mission-critical content and want to ensure teh safest and most reliable delivery, usual CDN options may not be enough. With a DIY CDN combined with a third-party CDN you can deal with content delivery challenges better and reap all benefits of both solutions reaching optimal results. To sum it up, with a DIY CDN solution you can:

• Eliminate downtime and outages.
• Reduce the risk of failure.
• Implement your private nodes that will serve as “origin shield” to improve content delivery and cache-hit ratio preventing damage from sudden traffic flows and calls from CDN.
• Ensure excellent performance, because you won’t need to share resources of third-party CDN with thousands of other users.
• Direct traffic to you private CDN nodes or third-part nodes to ensure maximum performance and efficiency according to demands of your business while having overall control over costs.
• Secure your content with your private CDN.