What advantage does a CDN offer in web development?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is designed to enhance the delivery of web content by utilizing a network of servers distributed across various geographical locations. This architecture allows a CDN to cache and store copies of content closer to end-users, significantly reducing latency and improving load times. When a user accesses a website, the CDN routes the request to the nearest server, ensuring that the data travels a shorter distance.

This advantage of delivering web content quickly is crucial for improving user experience, particularly for websites that have a global audience. Faster load times can lead to lower bounce rates, better engagement, and overall improved performance of web applications. In contrast, the other options do not accurately describe the pivotal function of a CDN; they include hosting on a single server, which defeats the scalability and speed benefits, increasing load time rather than reducing it, and offering free hosting, which is not universally applicable to all CDNs. Thus, the correct answer reflects the core benefit of utilizing a CDN in web development.