A request from Budapest to a server in Virginia carries its distance in milliseconds, both ways, for every file. A CDN puts cached copies on edge servers worldwide, so the same file travels fifty kilometers instead of an ocean — and absorbs traffic spikes and much of the attack surface while it is at it.
For static assets and pre-rendered pages a CDN makes 'hosting' largely a non-question: the origin serves deploys, the edge serves visitors. The discipline is in cache behavior — long cache lifetimes on fingerprinted files, careful invalidation on HTML, and knowing what must never be cached.
Related terms
Edge computing
Running code on the CDN's edge servers — close to the user — instead of one origin far away; personalization without the round trip.
HTTP caching
Headers that tell browsers and CDNs how long a response may be reused — the cheapest performance optimization that exists.
Static generation (SSG)
Rendering pages to HTML at build time, so a request is answered by handing over a file instead of running code.
The bench this belongs to
Web performanceA rebuild that loads on a phone on mobile data, in the country your customers are actually in. Core Web Vitals are the measurement, revenue is the point.
