These days most businesses deal with tight budgets and constant changes, and they are looking for effective ways to manage web hosting needs. Due to the unstable market environment, some may find more possibilities in cloud hosting services like CDNs than traditional setups. In fact, CDN hosting is the revolutionary invention of the internet world, but is it necessary for businesses to move from traditional website hosting to cloud computing services?
Here we will define what each hosting service offers and talk about the difference between CDN and traditional web hosting. Let’s start by looking at the main definitions of traditional and CDN hosting.
What Is Traditional Web Hosting?
Traditional website hosting services authorize individuals and organizations to post a website or webpage onto the internet. Simply put, it means with a traditional website hosting service, one rents some online space on a physical server where all the files and data for a website are stored.
A web host is a business that provides services that a website or a webpage needs to be viewed on the internet. While using a web host, website data (files, documents) is stored on special physical computers known as servers (Origin server). The end-users will type that website address/domain into the browser. The users’ computers will then connect to the website’s origin server, and the requested web page will be delivered to them.
With a web hosting service, each request must return to the origin server, and that will increase the website’s workload. As a matter of fact, the further the distance between the users and an origin server, the longer users will have to wait.
There was a point when web hosting was the most effective way of connecting users to a specific website or webpage. However, with the vast improvement and exceptional reputation of intent territory, the web hosting services are no longer capable of meeting websites/users’ demands such as speed and space.
What Is CDN Hosting?
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a cloud-based, networked system of numerous powerful servers known as edge servers distributed in different geographical locations to provide the fastest delivery of internet multimedia content. CDNs are a cache (“copy”) of content and can provide users with great web performances and numerous services ideally.
While with web hosting, a website is hosted on a single server in a single datacenter. CDN distributes a website’s content, such as videos or images, by putting them closest to the end-users. CDN virtual servers are situated across the world, and for that, they can manage to provide the nearest server to the user to respond to a web query. They will solve the latency issue, which is the delay in loading a web page. Once the geographical distance is shortened by CDN service, rich and high-quality multimedia content will be delivered to users in a cost-effective way.
CDN Hosting vs. Traditional Web Hosting
As you may know, CDNs do not host websites, but they can improve the website performances of hosted servers. Here is a detailed explanation of traditional web hosting vs. cloud computing.
Access
Traditional web hosting service is more about hosting a website on a server and allowing users access. A content delivery network service is used to increase expediency and speed up the loading, access, and delivery of website assets to end-users. This is considered to be the main difference between CDN and web hosting.
Download Time
A considerable feature of traditional web hosting vs. cloud computing is that traditional web hosting services will deliver 100% of a website’s content to the end-users. Still, if the users are further from the origin server, the load time will increase. The closest server to the end-user will deliver the requested data or content in a CDN service, decreasing the download times.
Content Availability
Increasing traffic and hardware failure will cause functioning problems in traditional web hosting. With a CDN, the website content will be available continuously. This feature is mostly highlighted for streaming videos by using a VDN (Video Delivery Network). Putting VDN vs. web server delivery in perspective, a VDN accelerates delivery, stores content temporarily on multiple servers and offers high-quality video content and seamless performance.
Bandwidth Consumption
The amount of data transfer in web hosting is bandwidth, and it will increase the expenses. When a website uses web hosting without CDN, the requests go to the origin server every time the website loads. The content goes out from the same server. The continuity of this data transfer will cause more costs. The CDN distributes servers cache data, which cuts down the traffic, and reduces latency and bandwidth consumption.
Distributions
The traditional web hosting service is a single static server. Nevertheless, a CDN is a geographically distributed set of edge servers that deliver unlimited content using a multi-host environment. This will directly affect a website’s performance.
Security
In web hosting, all the data is conducted from a single server, which will increase a website’s vulnerability to malicious attacks (like DDoS attacks). The risk of these attacks will be reduced with CDN hosting. CDNs provide higher authentication and encryption standards and will refresh TLS/SSL certificates persistently.
The Benefits of CDN Hosting
The content delivery system offers significant advantages to websites. Some may consider CDN’s speed as its most remarkable benefit, but the list is ongoing. Since the internet world is constantly changing, using a CDN service and a web hosting solution is more of a necessity. Therefore, the content delivery system has become a priority for a variety of reasons:
Performance
Using CDN hosting will reduce the latency and minimize packet loss. That means content will deliver faster; the quality of web pages will improve, end-users engagement will increase, web pages will load quickly no matter what the locations, browser, device, or networks are. Finally, the performance of the website speeds up.
Availability
While using a cloud computing service, a website’s contents will be available through users’ traffic, intermittent spikes, potential server outages, hardware issues, and even network problems. The CDN distributed edge serves to provide instant delivery to users across the globe.
Also read: Cloud Solutions for Small Businesses
SEO Improvement
Based on some search engine algorithms (like Google), a fast loading website will rank higher on the search engine results page. Using a cloud hosting service will naturally increase the content delivery and loading time of webpages, directly affecting implementing SEO strategies.
Lower Costs
Once the cloud hosting service is activated, the load will be distributed, and it saves bandwidth. With CDN hosting, a website does not need other speeding tools or specific infrastructures. It will also eliminate the need to pay for foreign hosting and save lots of money. It is recommended to the companies with a lower budget.
Security
As the transferring of high-value data and transactions increases on the internet, cybercrimes will happen frequently. A CDN’s cloud-based protocols and detailed authentication will protect a website’s content and data. It ensures that everything is encrypted. A CDN mitigates DDoS attacks on its edge servers, and that will also protect the central datacenter (origin server).
Analytics
One of the significant benefits of CDN hosting is that it will provide website owners with priceless analytical information, such as strengths and weaknesses, load statistics, capacity per customers, popular assets, active regions, sale leads, and many other details a developer might need to optimize or enhance the user’s experiences.
Scalability
If website traffic fluctuates, web hosting resources are most likely to be interrupted. While business is growing, cloud hosting technology like CDN can scale up the resources by providing more space (CPU, Memory, Storage).
Final Thoughts
This article provides an overview of the difference between CDN hosting and traditional web hosting, alongside comparing CDN vs. web server features and explaining the benefits of CDN hosting.
It is not wrong to say that traditional web hosting may work fine in some cases. However, if you are trying to be at the top of your game and your business is booming, it is better to consider using cloud computing services. In comparing cloud CDN hosting and traditional web hosting, a CDN service is a more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution.
Online visitors have an unrelenting need for speed. If a business wants to grow its web presence, a reliable, scalable content delivery network, like ArvanCloud CDN service, is a worthy investment with maximum delivery.
