Cloud Computing is not a file hosting service and PaaS is not a CDN!

We wrote several articles on Cloud Computing, PasS and content delivery network (CDN). There are some articles on Page Speed too. This is common mistake to get confused Cloud Computing with File Hosting Service and PaaS with CDN.

We received a comment, the user has asked, where the user actually has got confused with Cloud Computing and File Hosting service.

We tried to search a bit on Google to find out what is the root cause of the misconception that Cloud Computing or its level PaaS can be used as CDN and found there are several forums, where the poster’s original intention were to make understand the topic in some different way, but it may be has been difficult for a general user to understand the difference of Cloud Computing with File Hosting service.

Cloud Computing is not File Hosting Service

File Hosting is certainly a part of cloud computing, but it is not cloud computing ! There are several Free Cloud Services which you can you put in the category of software-as-a-service.

Dropbox relies on infrastructure-as-a-service. So is it cloud computing and it can be used as a real CDN ? Yes and no. It is beyond this blog’s capacity to explain so much theoretical discussion on Cloud Computing. You can take it as Cloud Computing, but definitely it can not be “defined” as CDN anyway.

Although Appengine is running on Cloud Computing, you can not use it as CDN

Appengine runs instance of PaaS (a level of Cloud Computing as written in other articles). You can deploy Google’s Appengine to run the application.

There might be legal issues or might not be, if you basically hotlink files on this Cloud Computing instance but certainly it will not be a CDN.

Page Spped Tests might show a bit better performance, but the users will experience the reverse : suddenly some image component will appear without any indication in the browser progress bar. This is a kind of Cloud Computing and not a CDN.