Why Are Hosting and CDN Services Mixed?
These two terms, which are very confused with each other, are the most known topics by website administrators.
With the increasing number of website, the names of these two services began to be known by more people. In fact, these two terms have many differences as well as similarities.
Clear understanding of these two terms allows website administrators to meet their needs correctly.
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What is Web Hosting?
Hosting is a service that stores the contents of websites on a server or a computer. All static and dynamic contents of website are stored on the hosting servers.
Web servers provide hosting services for all content files of hundreds of website and make them accessible on the internet. In this way, you can serve your content to the site visitors.
Hosting companies that store website contents of their customers should provide non-stop service for them. The reason for this is the requirement of websites to be uninterruptedly 24/7 accessible. Otherwise it becomes impossible for your site to be viewed by your visitors on the web.
For this reason, hosting servers should always be active. Also, it needs to be much more advanced than a common computer.
What is CDN Service?
CDN is a content delivery network to accelerate your content on the web. It responds to the incoming requests by showing your site contents that it keeps on its own servers.
CDN servers located around the world host your site content. In this way, the visitors can request your contents from the geographically closest CDN server. With CDN service, the distance of your origin server to the incoming request is not problem for your site anymore.
What are the benefits of a CDN service?
- Site visitors can reach your content from the closest CDN server, so they won’t faced with a waiting problem. In this way, a significant improvement on the website loading speed can be achieved.
- CDN lightens your origin server by taking the most of the traffic on your site. And it saves you from technical expenses.
- Website crashes which are more likely to occur in peak traffic times, are eliminated thanks to CDN.
Why Merlin CDN?
- Merlin CDN allows you create your distributions easily with simple and easy-to-use management panel.
- Its advanced interface allows you to make even the most difficult configurations without any difficulty.
- You can enhance your cyber security with our WAF (Web Application Firewall) service. You can secure your site from OWASP Top 10 cyber attacks with a few clicks.
- Merlin has more than 40 servers located in many parts of the world. In this way, you can reach all your customers regardless of their zone.
- Its workspace feature allows you to work and execute various works with many people.
If you want to accelerate your content and take advantage from CDN technology, you can start using Merlin CDN with 10$ free credit!
What are the differences between hosting and CDN service?
Hosting and CDN are the services that have many similarities as well as differences. The similarities can sometimes be confusing for people that don’t have enough knowledge. For this reason, they need to search about Hosting and CDN services to reach more detailed knowledge.
The differences between these two services can be listed as follows:
- Hosting has web servers that store all the contents of website. And site is mainly hosted on these origin servers. However, CDN servers host the site contents within themselves by caching on the origin server at certain periods of time. After every caching process, CDN servers continue to host the latest version of site.
- CDN has multiple servers in different parts of the world. For this reason, the speed of your content to reach to the incoming request becomes faster. However, your origin server is always in the same place. There can be 1 or 2 origin servers according to site size. It is impossible to respond the requests coming from different geographical regions at the same speed for origin servers. The reason for this is that the further the request comes from, the longer the distance will be.
- CDN servers can not work without Hosting servers. There must always be an origin server to which the content will be copied.
- A website must host its content on a server in order to uninterruptedly serve its contents on the web. CDN service plays an important role in enhancing the performance of sites. However, a site doesn’t have to keep the content on CDN servers.
What are the similarities of these two services?
There are many similarities caused to confusion on minds. Since both Hosting and CDN services are dealing with the website content, it is difficult to understand these two terms clearly.
The points that cause similarities can be listed as follows:
- Both Hosting and CDN services must have a server or servers to serve their customers. The number of server in these service providers differs from each other. However, the number of CDN servers are higher than the number of Hosting servers, if you are taking two services for a website.
- Both types of servers vary in their capacities and performances, depending on their features.
Why don’t we use only CDN server?
CDN, aka content delivery network, takes the site contents from origin server and host them on its own server. CDN servers are not working like origin servers. It distributes the fresh (renewed) content from origin server within its own network only by caching at regular intervals and delivers it to the end user.
If you want to deliver your site contents at high speed to the different parts of the world, you can start using Merlin CDN with 10$ free credit.