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Glossary · Network

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Also calledcontent delivery networkcdn meaning
Definition

A CDN (content delivery network) is a company that runs servers in many cities and answers requests for a website from a location near the visitor instead of from the site's own server.

Explanation

In depth

Big sites rarely serve visitors directly. They put a CDN such as Cloudflare, Fastly or Akamai in front. The CDN keeps copies of static files in data centres around the world, ends the visitor's HTTPS connection near them, filters attacks and bots, and forwards only what it must to the origin server. Technically that makes a CDN a reverse proxy. A web proxy like AnyProxy is the opposite direction: a forward proxy acting for the visitor. The October 2026 DomainScan scan shows how concentrated this is. reddit.com, pinterest.com, bbc.com, cnn.com, theguardian.com and twitch.tv were served from Fastly's network (AS54113); chatgpt.com, discord.com, vimeo.com, x.com, perplexity.ai and signal.org from Cloudflare's (AS13335); tiktok.com and ebay.com from Akamai's. Shared infrastructure means shared failure: on 8 June 2021 one Fastly configuration bug took Reddit, Twitch and many news sites offline for about an hour. It also matters for blocking, because a country that blocks a CDN's addresses can break unrelated sites at once. anyproxy.site itself is delivered through Cloudflare, but proxied sessions run on AnyProxy's regional servers, which fetch each page live rather than from a cache.

In practice

CDN (Content Delivery Network) in the real world

Two CDN facts from AnyProxy's own setup. The main site, anyproxy.site, resolves to Cloudflare addresses (AS13335) and its responses carry server: cloudflare and a cf-ray header. The regional session hosts, sg., fr. and us.anyproxy.site, do not go through Cloudflare. On the other side, when a proxied page is on a CDN, the CDN answers the proxy server, not you. Cloudflare's trace page reported colo=FRA when opened through AnyProxy Frankfurt on 15 Oct 2026.

Sources: TechCrunch — Fastly outage (8 June 2021) · Cloudflare — global network · Cloudflare trace page used in the tests

Measured · 2026-10-05

Popular sites on shared CDNs

From a DomainScan scan of 37 popular sites.

Cloudflare · 6Vimeo, X, Discord, Signal, ChatGPT, Perplexity
Fastly · 6Twitch, Reddit, Pinterest, BBC, CNN, The Guardian
Akamai · 2TikTok, eBay

We checked

Which CDN data centre answered the proxy (15 Oct 2026)

Cloudflare trace page opened through AnyProxy Frankfurt, listing colo=FRA, loc=DE, http=http/2, tls=TLSv1.3 and sni=plaintext, with the IP line hidden

Open Cloudflare's diagnostic page one.one.one.one/cdn-cgi/trace through the Frankfurt region

Worked · FR exit · 2026-10-15

Page loaded as plain text: colo=FRA, loc=DE, tls=TLSv1.3, http=http/2, sni=plaintext, kex=X25519MLKEM768. The ip= line (the proxy's exit address) was hidden before the screenshot.

Questions about CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Why do several sites go down at the same time?
They often share a CDN. A fault at Fastly, Cloudflare or Akamai affects every site behind it, as the 8 June 2021 Fastly outage showed.
Is AnyProxy on a CDN?
The anyproxy.site website is delivered through Cloudflare. Proxied browsing runs on AnyProxy's own regional servers in Singapore, Frankfurt and Virginia (plus Tokyo and Los Angeles on Pro), which fetch pages live.
Is a CDN the same as a proxy?
A CDN is a reverse proxy working for websites. A web proxy is a forward proxy working for visitors. Both relay traffic, for opposite sides.

Related terms

Reverse proxyA reverse proxy works for a website: it sits in front of the site's servers, takes every visitor's connection, and decides what reaches the real server.Edge serverAn edge server is a server placed close to users, at the 'edge' of a network, so requests are answered nearby instead of travelling to a distant central data centre.PoP (Point of Presence)A point of presence (PoP) is a physical site, usually a rack in a data centre, where a network has equipment and connects to other networks and to its users.LatencyLatency is the delay for data to travel from your device to a server and back, measured in milliseconds; it is why a page can feel slow on a fast connection.

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