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Understanding Key Differentiators between Cloud and CDN Services

Understanding Key Differentiators between Cloud and CDN Services

Enhanced operational efficiency is the holy grail of modern organizations and it can only be achieved with help of seamless connectivity and greater speed. The most significant challenge to drive efficiency is bridging the gap between service provider and users.

In case of online enterprises such as ecommerce companies, their websites provide the sole medium to gain greater reliability and confidence of customers. Business websites must exhibit optimum availability and speed of page loading by leveraging a dependable and high performance hosting platform.

The recent advent of cloud is also a revolutionary development that is aimed at better performing website for an enhanced browsing experience. Thanks to sharing of important resources in public cloud environment, cloud computing enables superior efficiency at affordable costs. Cloud’s pay as you go billing method further boosts cost efficiency of cloud hosting solutions.

Content Delivery Networks are being leveraged by a large number of websites to provide gain attributes of latency mitigation and instant accessibility to website content in multiple formats. CDN can effortlessly distribute static pages, live streaming, scripts, and graphic images to remotely located end users.

Content Delivery Networks operate through an assortment of remotely distributed data centers that are designed to deliver content to users in the closest proximity of the nodes. CDN aims at transporting and positioning the content in the nearest data centers to facilitate instant delivery of requested files.

Purpose of a CDN and cloud solution is to enhance efficiency by improving speed. This calls for an in-depth comparison of two resources to find out which one is better and why. In order to improve our understanding, it would be great if it is possible to know how the two significant tools are able to resolve issues that are regularly being faced by websites.

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Mitigation of latency
Page loading speed has been a hot topic of discussions that are centered on enhancement of customer’s browsing experience and improving potential of your business websites to covert visitors to customers. A mere few seconds’ delay in page loading can cost you thousands of potential customers.

Cloud computing leverages an extensive network of underlying servers and thus offers better user experience for the visitors. Any enterprise can choose appropriate location of data centers to make sure that the target audience is offered benefits of low latency.

On the other hand, the very purpose of a Content Delivery Network is to accelerate dissemination of content for an enhanced browsing experience. Content Delivery Network maintains availability of cached content in edge servers positioned at geographically scattered data centers for mitigation of latency.

Therefore we can conclude that CDN hosting offers superior user experience by acceleration of page load speed and improving conversions.

Website performance
Speed of page loading and uninterrupted availability can be considered as the two important parameters of a high performance website or web application. Content Delivery Networks as well as cloud server hosting have proven efficacy to elevate site’s performance by improving availability and speed.

If you take a critical view of Content Delivery Network solution, then you will find that the basic purpose of CDN is to increase availability of content by providing additional stock points in different geographical regions. Improvement of website’s performance can be attributed to the servers that are enabling transmission of cached content through CDN POPs and not to Content Delivery Networks as such. In contrast, cloud hosting services enable an efficient platform for delivery of broad spectrum of resources. These resources can be in the form of infrastructure, software, or platform and can be procured as per need.

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Cloud hosting services are divided as public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud hosting solutions for delivering IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS as few of the cloud service models. These can be leveraged as development platforms or for hosting one’s own infrastructure or applications.

Cost considerations
Comparison of Content Delivery Network and cloud on the basis of cost efficiency can be done in order to find a more affordable option. Web hosting providers offer CDN hosting either as part of regular hosting plans or as a separate offering. It is also found that many hosting service providers offer free CDN services to their clients.

CDN solutions are therefore more economical than cloud computing. Cloud services can also prove to be cost efficient, thanks to utility style billing methods adopted by many providers. Clients are required to pay only for the services that are actually consumed by them.

Dependability
Reliability of a hosting platform is measured in terms of uptime guarantee and scalability of server resources. In contrast, the overall performance of a CDN solution relies on the origin server. Reputed hosting service providers offer highly dependable cloud hosting platforms and therefore cloud hosting services can be considered to be more reliable than CDN services.

While considering CDN or Cloud services, one must analyze individual needs to choose the right alternative. While a cloud service can provide a large array of hosting services, the features of CDN hosting are comparatively restricted.

Interesting Topic:

What Does Cloud Hosting Mean?

How Do Content Delivery Network Work?


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