Push CDN vs Pull CDN – Choosing the right CDN for your Website
While there are a lot of content delivery network providers in the market, they generally work the same way.
Content is delivered to your web visitors as fast as possible by using strategically located servers around the globe.
Through these servers, web page requests are responded to quicker, and the origin server are not overburdened by traffic.
However, while generally, that is the way how content delivery networks or CDNs work, there are actually two types of CDN based on how they pull files and other elements of a page and present it to the visitor.
And there are cases where Push CDN is better than Pull CDN, or vice versa.
What is Push CDN?
Push CDN refers to the type of content delivery network where the CDN servers act similar to how the origin server acts.
In this scenario, the origin server sends the content directly to the CDN servers, automatically or manually, and links to it. These content are cached in the server unless it is deleted or purged because a new version of the page is sent.
The main principle here is that you, the website owner, is responsible for the content that will be delivered by the CDN to your visitors. When you push a content to the CDN server, this will be the content that will be served to your visitors when it receives a web request.
What are the benefits of Push CDN?
Push CDNs give you the advantage of being flexible with your content. As the owner of the website and creator of its content, you can directly specify which content will be pushed to the CDN server, when that content will expire, and when it has to be updated.
This is an efficient and a much more straightforward use of traffic, especially from origin server to the CDN servers. The content is only uploaded to the CDN server when there are some changes, which keeps traffic very low.
What is Pull CDN?
Pull CDN, on the other hand, is the complete opposite of Push CDN. And not just by name. In push CDN, the website owner is responsible for uploading the content to be delivered in CDN servers. In pull CDNs, on the other hand, the CDN itself is responsible for pulling the right content to be delivered to visitors.
What happens is that you, the website owner, leaves the content on the origin server, and rewrites the URLs so that it points to the CDN.
When a certain request for a web page is made, the CDN will then pull the web page elements and files from the origin server and serve it to the visitor.
The CDN server will then cache this version of the page until it expires.
What are the Benefits of Pull CDN?
The main advantage of pull CDNs is that it is pretty easy to set up because the CDN mostly does the work for you. In addition, since it only pulls web page elements and files once an initial request is made, it also minimizes storage consumption.
However, pull CDN method can also lead to some problems because it is less flexible as Push CDN. It is actually common to have redundant traffic because web page elements and files are re-queried even before they have been changed.
Also, Pull CDN can also be slower compared to Push CDN because visitors who are accessing the page for the first time or those trying to open a web page after the elements and files in the CDN has expired may experience slightly slower page load speed.
Push CDN vs Pull CDN â What fits your website?
Before you even think that choosing one from the other is a life or death situation for your website, you are wrong. Both methods will work out fine for any website. It is just that in some cases, one method is preferable from the other. Either way, both will work out fine.
But to give you a better idea, Pull CDN is the preferred method for websites that get a lot of traffic because content remains relatively stable and the traffic is pretty spread out.
If you have minimal amount of traffic, you might prefer Push CDN because content is pushed to the server once, then left there until changes are needed.
BelugaCDN Content Delivery Network Solutions
Whether you prefer the Pull or Push CDN method, BelugaCDN can support your content delivery needs.
Our secure and reliable CDN services will help you accelerate your web page speed while extending your reach globally.
For a free trial, go to https://www.belugacdn.com/cdn/#plans
In the end, just get CDN hosting. Talk to your CDN providers so that the CDN VS web servers debate is over, and your use of web servers will be improved. We at BelugaCDN would like to guide you in this discussion of CDN vs web servers, but you’ll have to make the first step in our conversation. Contact us here, and will give more input about this debate.
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