Content Delivery Network (CDN) vs Web Hosting Servers | CDN vs Dedicated Hosting | CDN vs Cloud Hosting | Google Page Speed Services
CDN and Web Hosting seem to be similar, but they are totally two different concepts. Web Hosting is hosting your content of your website in a server. There are different hosting plans available these days like shared hosting, VPS (Virtual Private Hosting), Dedicated Hosting and Cloud Hosting. Since the web data become richer, in the sense, more with Audio, Video or bigger page sizes, it consumes more bandwidth to deliver the end user or the person who is browsing. On top of bandwidth, it takes more time to load the content of the webpage to the user. Here only, the CDN network comes into the picture.
Web Hosting
There are different methods and technologies to build a web hosting server. These days, we can’t simply talk only about web servers as most of the websites have applications like MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL etc. So, it is total hosting solution that includes web servers, as well as application servers. According to your traffic (hits) you can decide which solution to go for. The basic web hosting solution is shared hosting. If you have more traffic, and needs more performance you may need to go with VPS (Virtual Private Server), Dedicated Hosting or Could Hosting. Dedicated hosting solution is expensive, but its an ideal solution for high performance applications and high traffic environment.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) | Why we need CDN for websites?
If you have more users (hits) coming to your website, you may need to consider CDN implementation for your website. CDN is a distributed network acting as a cache of your web pages in different geographical locations. It could be categorized under content optimized delivery. Assume, you have hosted your website in west coast of US, and the users are spread across the world. When every user request for a page from your web, it has to come from west US. Think of a user requesting a page from Hong Kong, still the page need to travel from West US to Hong Kong. So what CDN does is, it caches your static content of your website in several nodes across the world, and depend upon the origin of the request , it delivers static part of your website, or pages from distributed locations closer to the user. It makes the content delivery faster than delivering from a web server. There are mechanisms to keep the CDN content up to date with the original content in the web server. By introducing CDN, we get fast delivery, save International bandwidth, have more redundancy, and low latency for our web.
Google is also planning to introduce CDN for users, which is called “page speed services”. At the moment, Google is testing this service with selected users, and it will be a chargeable service from Google soon.
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What is the difference between CDN Hosting and Web Hosting? (1) Web Hosting is to host your web in a server to allow people to access from Internet, whereas CDN increases the delivery speed of your web content across the world. (2) CDN at the moment deliver only the static part of your website, but Google is planning to cache the whole page including content of your web pages, web servers on the other hand, contain all your web related content. (3) Mostly, web content are hosted in a single server, but CDN content will be spread across the world, in multiple hosted environment.
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