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While most readers will probably be familiar with the term ‘caching,’ CDNs – or content delivery networks – might be a little bit more mysterious. To start unpacking the CDNs vs caching question, what is generally understood is that both approaches enable companies to deliver content to their customers more quickly. Yet which one of these is the better option for your business?
What is caching?
For the sake of clarity, caching is a well-established technological approach for the temporary storage of your website’s content. Particularly when it comes to web development in a corporate setting, this is one of the very best ways to increase customer engagement and retention, as it greatly reduces your overall page loading times.
What types of caching exist?
Scratch beneath the surface, however, and you will find that caching is a lot more versatile than initially imagined, as there are many variations of this popular process.
Browser caching
Built right into the user’s web browser, a browser cache will typically contain images, multimedia files, HTML pages and CSS stylesheets. These are stored by the browser on the visitor’s device and grouped together with related content.
Micro caching
Micro caching, on the other hand, will only store content for a short time period (no more than 10 seconds), and is therefore a targeted option for companies with highly dynamic websites. Businesses should bear in mind that it is also controlled by end users with limited input from the website owner.
Server caching
Finally, server caching covers a surprising variety of different types of caching. These are solely administered by the website owner, which means the end user has no control over the data. More importantly, however, they include object caching, opcode caching, and notably, Content Delivery Network (CDN) caching.
What Is a CDN?
So, we’ve established a connection to caching, but what exactly makes a content delivery network unique? As it turns out, a remarkable amount of factors! In fact, caching is only one small aspect of a working CDN.
Let’s examine how it works in practice. When every server request is sent to the same location, it can often take a lot of time and effort for that request to make it back to the end user. This occurs because there are likely thousands of users around the world who are simultaneously sending in their requests. This is where a CDN like Cloudflare can potentially be of great assistance.
As the name suggests, a CDN is a global network of distributed servers with the common purpose of delivering content both as quickly and reliably as possible. Essentially, it acts as a layer between the user and server to ensure user requests are sent to the nearest location. In addition, CDNs pull static content from an edge server to significantly improve delivery speeds (i.e. caching).
What are the benefits of CDNs?
Beyond latency reduction, one of the main benefits of employing a CDN is having the ability to prevent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. After all, a properly configured CDN can use its scale as a protection mechanism to mitigate traffic attacks that would wreak havoc on a single origin server. Other benefits may include:
Reduced bandwidth costs and origin server load
Intelligent user monitoring and analytics
Increased content availability
Still, in spite of these benefits, a CDN is certainly not for everyone. In fact, it is even worth pointing out that for the vast majority of companies, caching should be more than sufficient. Nevertheless, businesses offering the following services will undoubtedly benefit from a CDN:
Larger online platforms
Companies with thousands of users across the world
SaaS with mobile front-ends
Any business providing live streaming of audio and video content
Should any of these be the case for your company, bear in mind that you may occasionally experience caching delays when a version conflict occurs on different servers. Moreover, if any of your “neighboring” services has their IP blocked due to legal reasons, your website could also be blocked along with it.
Thankfully, however, these not only would be isolated events, but they should also be dealt with fairly quickly.
Conclusion
While every CDN performs caching, but not everything that performs caching could be a CDN. So to settle the CDNs vs caching debate, ultimately, if you have the funds and would like to take full advantage of today’s web optimization processes, then you should probably employ a mixture of both approaches. Just remember that even if your company is currently making use of a CDN, it is critical to set up resource caching for all of your company’s web development projects.
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