Types of server hosting
There are lots of ways we can host a website, or other program.
Shared server nodes
often, for small sites, a company or person will rent some space of a server from a hosting company, and then their files will be hosted on that server, which also hosts many other websites for other people at the same time.
Dedicated server nodes
Sometimes, dedicated servers are used, which means that the company or person has the whole server to themselves, and they don’t have to share it with anyone else. This is much more expensive though and often, you need to manage the server yourself.
Cloud delivery networks
Certain companies provide something called a cloud delivery network (or CDN as you might have heard it). That’s where you have a network of servers all around the world, and when a user tries to access your website, the CDN that’s nearest to the user will respond to that request.
- This is much faster, because the data doesn’t have to travel as far.
- it also means that if one server goes down, the other servers can still respond to requests, so your website won’t go down just because one server has a problem. This is especially important for big websites that get a lot of traffic, because if one server goes down, it doesn’t usually affect the whole website, and the other servers can still respond to requests.
- However, only static sites can usually be hosted on a CDN. A static site is one that just contains a set of files, e.g. HTML files, CSS stylesheets and Javascript code. It does not rely on a central server to generate the files upon request.
This website is hosted on a CDN! That’s why, assuming your internet connection isn’t absolutely terrible, it should load within about 1/20th of a second (or 50 milliseconds) from anywhere in the world - assuming you’re not really really far from the nearest cloudflare server, which is the CDN that I use.
The reason it loads so fast is also partly because there’s no annoying Javascript on this website, and the HTML files are very small, so they can be sent to your browser very quickly. Basically all HTML files on the site are less than 5KB in size (10KB for some of the long articles), and the entire website can be loaded with just that file - so 5KB, if you’ve visited another page.