Difference Between a CDN And WEB Accelerator

Web accelerators are proxy servers that reduce website access times. Web Accelerators are just one type of CDN. Web accelerators fall in the category of technology and it may be difficult to see one type of implementation as the true implementation. Examples are on-the-fly compression/decompression, HTTP caches that are closer to the user than the origin server and reduce or eliminate processing time, and several others. CDNs use these technologies and others to put together what they think is the right kind of web acceleration that their clients need.

A web accelerator can be used either standalone, part of a commercial CDN, part of a homegrown CDN, part of a client installation, or even as a Reverse Proxy.

Web accelerators provide have a lot of functions and some of them include:

• Providing optimization for codes form documents
• Filtering out undesirable aspects such as ads, and so on, that clients do not require.
• Maintaining a persistent TCP connection between client and proxy server.
• Assisting to freshen objects in caches and ensuring that frequently accessed content is readily available for display.
• Providing caches that have been recently accessed or that are frequently accessed so that they may be sent at a fast rate.
• Resolving hostnames present in a document to reduce latency.

While web accelerators can be a good fit for users, they are not always the best choice.

What Is A CDN?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of web servers or Points of Presence (PoP) that helps to deliver faster content. The content is stored throughout the CDN for the user to be able to access the data which is stored at a location that is closest to the user. This is different than the traditional method of storing content on just one server and more effective too. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, to avoid the load that the server is usually encumbered with.

A CDN allows easy and quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content including java scripts, HTML pages, images, and videos. CDN has grown popular over the years and is now used on major websites like Netflix and Facebook.

A CDN hosts no content and does not replace the need for proper web hosting, however, it improves website performance by helping cache at the edge of the network. A lot of websites have complained about the struggle they encounter to have their professional needs met by conventional hosting services. CDNs help to address these concerns by serving as an alternative mode of hosting. Asides from this, CDNs help to sidestep some of the shortcomings of conventional web hosting which will be seen subsequently.

The goal of CDN is to deliver content in a quick, secure, cheap, and reliable manner. A CDN places servers at the exchange points between different networks for the improvement of speed and connectivity.

The Internet exchange points are the primary locations where different Internet providers connect to provide each other access to traffic originating on their different networks. Having a connection to these fast, highly interconnected locations helps a CDN provider to save costs process data with high-speed data delivery.

A CDN also makes some optimizations on standard client/server data transfers. A CDN can accelerate static content such as web pages, images, and scripts that make up a website; as well as accelerate file delivery e.g. software installers and patches, video and audio files

There are different types of CDNs that you can use, but they all have the same goal - to make your site load faster.

What Is A WEB Accelerator

A web accelerator is a server that reduces website access time. They may be installed on the client computer or mobile device, on the server computer/network, or a combination. Accelerating delivery through compression requires some type of host-based server to collect, compress and then deliver content to a client computer.

Essentially, a web accelerator is a tool that helps to increase the speed of the transfer of information between a web server and a browser. Websites require servers to deliver content to users who visit them. The more traffic a site attracts, the more physical server hardware is required to deliver a fast, enjoyable experience to users. Web accelerators present a substitute to physical server hardware to ensure a fast load time, which has the potential to save companies money and result in more leads and conversions.

Web accelerators do a lot of things to optimize both speed and security for websites. On the user-facing end, a web accelerator compresses pages, optimizes images, rewrites content, and minifies CSS and JS. All of these things are done by web accelerators to help pages load faster.

Web accelerators also help offload a company’s web servers via technologies like caching, compression offload, SSL offloading and decreased page generation time. This helps minimize the amount of physical server equipment a company needs to maintain an effective website.

Not only does a web accelerator quicken load times and minimize the need for physical servers, it tracks site functions, while also helping to secure web servers by protecting them from threats and attacks — all while keeping the site online for legitimate users. This helps companies to avoid any costly site downtime and protects the sensitive company and user information.

Organizations depend on web applications to support business operations and drive revenue. All users of your web applications need fast access—whether they are employees or consumers, mobile or remote. Slow page loading times or unresponsive applications frustrate users. Employee productivity can plummet, and consumers researching or shopping online might abandon the website.

Web Accelerators solve website content delivery issues by ensuring the best use of bandwidth and preventing duplicate data from being served to users. This increases the speed of the first and repeats visits to the portal, CRM, e-learning, and e-commerce sites. The result is significantly decreased download times, reduced bandwidth usage, and lower costs for using enterprise web applications in remote offices and mobile deployments.

There are challenges faced by users as a result of the spread of different types of mobile devices, from smartphones to tablets, which have different operating systems and browsers. Users may end up with a range of page download times, all of which are typically worse than what users get at the office or home. To resolve these performance issues, a Web Accelerator may use multiple layers of web performance optimizations that do not require any server-side installations, client-side software, or changes to users’ browsers.

Benefits Of Using CDN

A CDN is a network of servers linked together to deliver content as quickly, cheaply, reliably, and securely as possible. To improve speed and connectivity.

To avoid the usual dissatisfaction that comes from slow service, CDNs move content closer to the user to reduce latency and improve user experience. The use of CDNs comes with a lot of benefits, although there are challenges that may arise from using them.

First, to reduce the latency for any particular user, a CDN must have a content caching server (cache) that is close to them. Unfortunately, it is not feasible to have a nearby cache for every possible internet user. Instead, the caches are arranged into PoPs, distributed throughout large geographic regions, and then placed in major population centers within those regions.

Also, when a request is given by a single user, a CDN must direct it to the closest POP. Most CDNs do this by the use of a technology called GeoIP. GeoIP can be thought of as a large lookup table that maps IP addresses to geographic regions. When a request is being processed, a CDN will reference the table and direct the user’s traffic to the closest available server.

A CDN has the following benefits:

1. Improving website load times

CDN helps to distribute content closer to website visitors by using a nearby server. As visitors are more inclined to click away from a slow-loading site, a CDN can reduce bounce rates and increase the amount of time that people spend on the site. In other words, a faster website means more visitors will stay and stick around longer.

2. Helping to increase content availability and redundancy

Large amounts of traffic will usually interrupt normal website functions. Thanks to its distributed nature, a CDN can handle more traffic and withstand hardware failure better than many origin servers.

Hardware failures and a rise in traffic, as a result of either malicious attacks or just a boost in popularity, have the potential to bring down a web server and prevent users from accessing a site or service. A good CDN will help to minimize these downtimes.

A CDN helps to distribute network traffic evenly across several servers by load balancing, making it easier to scale rapid boosts in traffic. Having an Intelligent failover also provides uninterrupted service some of the CDN servers go offline due to malfunctioning, the failover can redistribute the traffic to the other operational servers. If an entire data center is having technical issues routing transfers assist the traffic to another available data center, thereby making sure that no users lose access to the website.

3. Helping to reduce bandwidth costs

Bandwidth consumption costs for website hosting are a primary expense for websites. Through caching and other optimizations, CDNs can reduce the amount of data an origin server must provide, thus reducing hosting costs for website owners.

4. Improving website security

A CDN may improve security by providing DDoS mitigation, improvements to security certificates, and other optimizations. A CDN can keep a site secured with fresh TLS/SSL certificates which will ensure a high standard of authentication, encryption, and integrity. Investigate the security concerns surrounding CDNs, and explore what can be done to securely deliver content. Learn about CDN SSL/TLS security.

5. Caching Content

Caching means to temporarily store. You can cache your content on a CDN so it’s delivered from the edge to your end-users much faster than if it had to be delivered from the origin. If you use a CDN, it means that if someone tries to access content from your website or mobile app, then that person’s request for content only needs to travel to a nearby POP and back, instead of going all the way to the company’s origin servers and back.

CDNs also remove and update content constantly, so that the most current, relevant content is delivered.

6. It is affordable

A common misconception is associating CDNs with a large price tag. Although this may depend on what type of CDN is used, many CDNs are affordable and with the speed increase usually recorded, it is worth the investment.

The cost of bandwidth is generally cheaper than that with a traditional hosting provider. And as you saw above, when using a CDN, it generally takes at least 60%+ of the load off of your origin server.

7. It is reliable

Seeing the website you worked very hard to build go down very frustrating. However, a CDN is set up to provide reliability. With a CDN, requests to your website are always routed to the nearest available PoP. If one is down, it simply passes the request onto the next one. This creates redundancy to ensure less downtime and a pleasant web experience.

8. Aids Traffic spikes and scalability

You may never know when your big break will be and you will get a traffic spike. Most web hosts will cripple under heavy loads. However, a CDN helps to avoid such issues.

9. Better security

A CDN can provide extra security. Since the majority of the traffic is being served through the CDN provider, they will mitigate DDoS attacks for you on their edge servers. 

Also, SSL and Secure Token are security measures that CDN gives you. Enabling SSL ensures that everything is encrypted between the CDN edge servers and the origin server. 

Who Can Use CDN?

Whoever has a website or mobile application that’s likely to be requested by more than one user at a time can benefit from a CDN, especially large, complex websites with users spread across the globe, and websites or mobile apps with lots of dynamic content. 

However, specific businesses will benefit greatly from CDN. Among those are;

E-commerce.

A CDN helps e-commerce sites deliver content quickly and efficiently even during times of heavy traffic. E-commerce companies use CDNs to expand their site performance and to make their products available online.

Finance and Government. Large, content-heavy websites can deliver vital information to citizens much more quickly and efficiently by using a CDN. CDNs provide banking institutions with a fast, secure, and reliable infrastructure to deliver sensitive data to consumers and analysts.

Media, Publishing & Advertising.

These are outlets that constantly need to deliver timely and latest information. CDNs fast-track streaming media content such as breaking news, movies, music, online games, and multimedia games in different formats. The content is made available from the data center which is nearest to the users’ location.

Technology and Mobile apps. A CDN delivers dynamic location-based content for mobile apps, reducing load times, and increasing responsiveness. Also, A CDN helps technology websites serve billions of requests a day to web users without decreasing performance.

Business Websites

CDNs increase the interaction between users and websites which is essential for corporate businesses. Speed is one important metric and a ranking factor for all websites.

Content delivery networks help to overcome problems that may result in slow connections by sending requested content to the user from the nearest server in CDN to give the best possible load times, thus speeding the delivery process.

What Is A CDN Used For In 2021?

CDNs are used for delivering static assets to the end-user. It helps make a site load faster, and it helps the user get the content they need as quickly as possible. In 2021, many CDNs will be able to deliver files on more than just static assets. CDNs will be able to deliver video files, live streams, and other types of media.

This will make CDNs more of a one-stop shop for delivering content to the end-user.

CDNs offer an easy way to increase the speed of a website while also lowering the latency. Therefore, they are essential for the fast, efficient, and secure delivery of content to users around the world. 

Over the years, more businesses have grown and gone online, and the world comes together on the Internet to shop, connect, and share, on a global scale. 

In 2021, CDNs will offer an easy way to increase the speed of websites while also lowering latency. Therefore, they will be highly essential for the fast and secure delivery of content to users around the world. As more businesses go online, and the world comes together on the Internet to shop, connect, and share, content providers face an increasing array of challenges such as the delivery of different types of content, adjusting the content for different device types (device detection), and securing data and the online presence of their end-users. The inherent capabilities of a content delivery network mean that CDN providers are uniquely positioned to help businesses overcome these diverse challenges of media delivery. This is most essential in 2021.

CDN will also be beneficial in 2021 in increased response time and reliability

If you run a website, you know that a high-performing website means there are a high conversion and growing sales. Speed issues cripple website reputation. In 2021, CDNs can be leveraged to create a good load speed, ensure it is more than and that online transactions are made seamlessly.

With the majority of the world population also online, CDN’s assistance for faster loading helps to give businesses a global reach. CDNs provide solutions through cloud acceleration with local POPs. This global reach will eliminate any latency problems that interrupt long-distance online transactions and cause slow load times. CDN can reduce the server load on interconnects, public and private peers, and backbones, releasing the overall capacity and decreasing delivery costs. Essentially, the content is spread out across several servers, instead of burdening only one server.

CDNs have automatic server availability sensing mechanisms with instant user redirection. As a result, CDN websites experience 100 percent availability, even during massive power outages, hardware issues, or network problems.

Available customer support is also very important for an increase in the number of concurrent users and consequently website growth. Strategically placing the servers in a CDN can result in high network backbone capacity, which equates to a significant increase in the number of users accessing the network at any given time