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You wake up one day intending to buy a bottle of Bordeaux, the famous French wine, to celebrate an important anniversary. Wherever you live, you will certainly not drive to Bordeaux to get it, but you will go to the closest wine shop. The CDN is the network of the local stores which provide web content to millions of people. And like a bottle of wine, if the web content is available nearby, it will be faster delivered to the customer.

A CDN’s goal is, therefore, to minimize the physical distance between the user and the website content in order to reduce the latency, the time frame between the page loading request and its show on the screen. This happens thanks to multiple and geographically distributed PoPs (Points of Presence, the single local shops) which store part of the website’s main server content, especially the static one.

Let’s a make a simple example.

Your website sells T-shirts. You live and operate from Singapore but your website’s server is in the US. A customer from Germany is now reaching your website. The web content he will visualize can be of a different kind. All the static content (i.e. the heavy load, the content that never or rarely changes like navigation menu, main pictures, HTML pages, javascript files, videos…) will be sent from the local PoPs.; the dynamic content (i.e. anything that depends on the user’s interaction and subject to changes) will be sent directly from the server in the US. This procedure will shorten the loading time in two ways: the heavy content will be sent more fastly since it comes from a source closer to the customer and, at the same time, the main server will be lightened and able to process faster the remaining data.

CDN’s popularity is quickly spreading. Any time we go on the internet, we deal with their transparent presence: nowadays, in fact, more than 50% of the websites are using them, including Facebook, Netflix and Amazon.

Do I need a CDN?

Your website needs a Content Delivery Network if its web audience is located in many different countries. Without a CDN, the main server (called origin server) must respond to every single user interaction with the website. This would create a significant traffic to the origin and, therefore, loading times and chances for failures would be exponentially higher.

Imagine to plan a road trip around Europe. After deciding all the cities you will be visiting, you calculate how much will it take moving from one stage to another. For example, if you want to go from Nice to Marseille, it will make a big difference to choose the large highway or a narrower coastal road. Bandwidth is the width of the road you choose to drive on. The larger it is, the faster you will reach your goal. The larger bandwidth your web hosting has, the more comfortable your visitors will feel.

Bandwidth is therefore a capacity (and not a speed!), i.e. the maximum amount of data volume that can be transmitted from one point to another over a certain period of time – the second. Thus, the bandwidth is expressed in megabits per second (Mbps): as higher the Mbps is, the more data your internet connection can send and receive at the same time. For instance, if you are downloading a movie you will need more bandwidth than when loading a webpage with text only. If your company’s employees are simultaneously working on the same network, they will need a larger bandwidth too in order to read files, download pages, reading emails, etc etc. Finally, if you have a webshop, the more visitors you have in a single portion of time, the slower their interaction with your server will be. Unless you already calculated how much bandwidth you need according to your traffic. This is the most common way to do it:

Bandwidth needed in a month = Average Page Views * Average Page Size * Average Monthly Visitors * Redundant Factor

The average Redundant Factor is something between 1.3 and 1.8. The Average Page Size can be easily calculated on https://tools.pingdom.com/ .

Still finding some difficulties? No worries, the following page will do all this job for you:

http://www.calculator.net/bandwidth-calculator.html

On top of this page you can see a white space with a sequence of letters starting with “https://www.webspace.com.mt“. That is the web address of the page you are reading now or, using the formal name, its Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A URL is made of different parts: it is easy to look at it as a street address where the street name is the domain name (webspace.com.mt in this case) and the civic number is what comes afterwards and it is related to a page or part of it within the same website.

Let’s take an easy example.

https://www.webspace.com.mt/what-type-of-web-hosting-do-i-need/

1. Regarding the first part, a URL always starts with a protocol prefix, like “http://” or “https://”. Lot of browers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer use the so-called Hyper Text Transfer Protocol to load web pages. The “s” in “https” means that the website is encrypted by a security code which prevents data stealing by hackers. To learn more about it, please visit our page address https://www.webspace.com.mt/ssl-certificates/
2. After the protocol, the second part of the web address consists of the domain name, a string that identifies a unique authority within the internet. Webspace.com.mt is therefore representing an organization that chose this simple name to be easily recognized and memorized by internet users. More technically, the domain name is an alphabetical (and more recognizable) abstraction of a numerical label, the Internet Protocol address (IP address), which has been assigned to the webhost’s server by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). When your computer server communicate with webspace.com.mt’s one, they use these IP addresses made up of numbers and the Domain Name System (DNS), the authority which controls the domain names, translates the IP address into the related URL and the requested webpage appears on your screen through the browser you are using.
3. The last part of the web address shows the position where a particular webpage is located on the server. Depending at which level of this path, webpages can be at the directory, folder or subfolders level following this order:
   www.domainname/directory/folder/subfolder1/subfolder2 etc. etc.

The best answer is asking yourself a couple of questions:

1. what kind of website do I want? Is it going to be a static website with information about your own company, a blog dedicated to your favourite hobby, a well on track webshop with lot of customers per day or a new business opportunity?
2. How are my IT competencies? Am I a beginner, a proficient user or anything in between?

These two questions can guide you to different kind of services and related web hosting types. The following list is covering the most common options:

• Shared hosting (for beginners/blogs/small businesses, economical solution)

• Dedicated hosting (for proficient users/big websites/complex business, expensive solution)

• VPS hosting (a mid way of the previous two, economical solution)

• Managed hosting (for specific Content Management Systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal)

Before introducing these four hosting services, just imagine to rent a holiday house and go through the different possibilities.

Shared hosting

With “shared hosting” you are going to share the holiday house with somebody chosen by the landlord. It is the budget option: you will pay 10/15 euros a month but you will depend on someone else’s behaviour. The webhoster will be putting one single server in share with up to 1k people and this might slow your website down in any time. Still it is a good choice for those who want to test a new activity, to have a blog or an information website at laughable prices.

This might be your first step in case of a start up activity: it will be easy to upgrate afterwards in case of a succesful business.

Dedicated hosting

If you have proficient IT competencies or an ongoing activity, the “dedicate hosting” will allow you to have one server at your complete disposal. You will rent your holiday house for yourself and your family only. This choice allows fully customized and flexible settings, faster performances and a higher level of security.

Dedicated hosting is therefore the most reliable service thanks to the exclusive relationship between the webhoster and the owner of the website.

VPS hosting

With a “Virtual Private Server Hosting” you will choose a flat inside a holiday condominium. Technically speaking, you will be sharing the same server with other 10-20 websites but the server itself will be divided into multiple “virtual” private servers. That means you will have a total administrative control over the VPS software (IT competencies will be required) without any of the hardware and maintenance costs that “dedicate hosting” requires. You will keep your costs down and still have freedom to customise your service.

This option is ideal for website owners with some IT knowelegde who want to low-cost advantages of a “shared hosting” service plus the flexibility of a dedicated one.

Managed hosting

Let’s say you want a holiday house for yourself but you don’t have enough knowledge of the surroundings: you should then go for a “managed hosting” service and the hosting provider will offer a day-to-day maintenance and support. It’s like having a camp counselor, if you need suggestions or run into trouble, you will ask his help and advice.

He might also lease you a Content Management System (CMS) like, for example, WordPress: this is one of the most common website platforms and it will help you out with an easy interface, detailed statistics and flexible templates ready to use