If you have a limited budget, what would you prefer: SSD top hosting or a decent cheap hosting with $$ additional CDN service?<p>I know, the both are the necessary, but if you need to choose, what if you need to choose among them, what do you choose?
If the content is mostly static and the audience is global in nature, then CDN.<p>If your content is dynamic, needs DB query for every page view then SSD hosting. Also if you are targeting only one country say US, then CDN might not bring that much value. NginX with disc based cache on SSD is quite fast for static content.<p>It will also depend on how much bandwidth usage you are looking at. For example, something like Linode offers 2TB bandwidth in their $10 plan. 2TB bandwidth on AWS CloudFront will cost you hundreds of USD.
There's no one-size-fits-all answer for this: CDNs have their place. As do individual, SSD-based servers/services.<p>Why the artificially-false dichotomy?