Edge hosting

How edge hosting works

Traditional hosting uses a single server in one location. When someone in Sydney visits a site hosted in London, their request travels 17,000 km—creating latency of 300+ milliseconds before content even starts loading.

Edge hosting distributes your site to hundreds of servers worldwide. Cloudflare's network spans over 300 cities. When that Sydney visitor requests your site, they connect to a Sydney server mere kilometres away. Latency drops to under 50ms—an instant improvement in perceived speed.

Performance benefits

Reduced latency improves every performance metric. Largest Contentful Paint, Time to First Byte, and overall load times all benefit from geographical proximity. Sites load instantly regardless of where visitors are located.

This global performance consistency is impossible with traditional hosting. A site optimised for UK users loads slowly in Asia. Edge hosting delivers fast experiences everywhere simultaneously—crucial for international audiences or distributed teams.

Beyond basic CDN

Edge hosting differs from traditional CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDNs cache static assets like images and scripts but still hit origin servers for HTML. Edge hosting serves everything—including page HTML—from the edge, eliminating origin server requests entirely for static sites.

Platforms like Cloudflare Pages deploy entire sites to the edge. No origin server exists. This architecture provides better performance, eliminates single points of failure, and requires zero server maintenance.

SEO and business impact

Google's Core Web Vitals reward fast sites with better rankings. Edge hosting makes achieving green scores straightforward—the infrastructure provides performance advantages that offset other optimisation work.

Fast global performance improves conversion rates. Visitors don't wait. Pages feel instant. This responsiveness builds trust and reduces drop-off, directly impacting business outcomes.

Fernside's edge hosting approach

Every site we build deploys to Cloudflare's edge network. This comes standard, not as an add-on. Your site loads instantly from Manchester to Melbourne with no configuration, traffic limits, or additional cost.