Every website lives and dies by its speed. A fast website is invisible to its users, allowing them to conduct their business smoothly and satisfactorily.
Anything less than instant connections jolts the customer out of their transactions, making them painfully aware of the time it takes to navigate from page to page. Optimizing your website connection times should always be a top priority, but the solution is not just a question of speed, but distance as well. As true in the digital sphere as it is for real estate, location matters. If your website servers are housed in Sao Paulo, a web visitor in Buenos Aires is going to have a faster connection time than someone in New York, who will in turn have a faster connection than a user in Lisbon.
Even though we think of website connections as instantaneous, distance still impacts speed. The further your servers are from your customers, the longer it will take. As enterprises pay increasing attention to their global presence, this inequality of data travel distance has been a hurdle that traditional systems still struggle to overcome. You can use every trick in the book to make your website performant, but if the end-user is too far away from your origin servers, those miliseconds of difference are going to come with a significant price tag.
Edge networks provide an innovative solution to this inequity by rethinking the distance problem. Instead, edge networks are composed of many small edge locations, each able to serve as its own server in handling queries and transmitting data.
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While this has many benefits for security and stability, a distributed edge network offers an elegant path to make any website globally accessible. The very nature of edge environments is that they exist in the blurry border territory between traditional networks and users. Distributed edge networks spread out their edge locations to cover wide areas, nationally and internationally.
