What is a CDN and best CDN providers

Last Updated on March 21, 2019 by Timothy Ephraim

If you own a website or a blog, you might be aware why it is important to have a fast loading website. Nowadays, website speed is also a ranking factor for Search engine and a slowly loading website can be a reason for lower search engine rankings. Solutions include the use of better web host (See our recommendations for best-shared web hosts, WordPress hosts and VPS hosting providers) and CDN for faster websites. What is CDN? We have explained it here and  have a list of best CDN providers which you can use to increase your website speed

What is CDN

CDN is one of most used technology now. They are designed to provide better, faster experience for users. To explain this, Let us say that You have a website which is hosted in the USA. You have a customer from the UK visiting your website. Data has to travel all they from the server which is located in the USA to the client’s computer which is located in the UK. Due to the distance, your customer may experience slower website loading time. CDN can be helpful. A CDN provider has servers spread all over the world and they make a cached copy of your website’s static content such as images, videos, CSS, and Javascript on their servers.

In such situation, For a user from the UK can experience better speed and latency because the website will be delivered from a CDN which is closer to him. This is how CDN usually work

Apart from providing faster user experience, CDN can also be helpful to provide DDoS mitigation, preventing attackers and filtering out bad crawlers and bots

Best CDN providers

BunnyCDN

POPs: 35

BunnyCND is a newer CDN provider who is growing fast. The reason why we put them on the top is due to the flexible plans they provide. They have around 36POPs around the world and the number is increasing rapidly.

Pricing

They have a pay as you go plan which offers lowest pricing per GB. This is a very useuful feature for those small business owners and bloggers. You can load as low as $10 credit which can be used  against CDN data you consume.

The credit you added is valid for one year and you can add more credit if you run out of credits. If you have bigger websites, you can more credits. One good thing about them is that id you add more credit before expiration of any credit which is left in your account, it will not be expired.

Features

BunnyCDN is so far the best when pricing and features are cosidered. They have a plethora of performance and security features HTTP/2, Brotli,Gzip,Free SSL, Realtime monitoring etc.

CloudFlare

CloudFlare is one of the best CDN providers and they have an excellent free plan too. With multiple choice of caching and an effective DDoS mitigation system, cloudflare can absorb most DDoS before it reaches your website. To avail DDoS mitigation you have to use a paid plan. But if your intention is to get better website load time and response time, the free plan would suffice. Another important thing is, they provide free SSL with the free plan so if you want to use a free SSL, you can consider CloudFlare.

Pricing

They do have a free plan which needs not to pay anything. The free plan comes with so many features such as free SSL and website security and caching. The paid plan starts from $20/month(Pro plan) which is reallyy good if you need more features such as a web application firewall(WAF).

KeyCDN

POPs:34

KeyCDN comes with a unique pay as you go pricing in which price gets reduced as usage goes high. This makes KeyCDN our favourite CDN provider. KeyCDN is suitable for bloggers and small business owners as they have a flexible pay as you plan, which means you only pay for what you used.

Pricing

Their pricing varies according to region. The more you use, cheaper their prices will be, and if you use more than 500TB, you can get a bulk pricing from them by contacting them.

Features

KeyCDN offers many other features such as HTTP/2 support, 100% SSD optimized servers, Free Letsencrypt SSL and 34 datacenter locations worldwide.

MaxCDN

Max CDN is another well-known CDN provider. Their plan starts at $9 a month with up to 1. While this plan is suitable for bloggers and small websites, they have a bigger plan which costs $299 a month which is suitable for large and rapidly growing websites.  Max CDN provides 24/7 dedicated support and a dedicated account manager.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is another secure CDN provider which will help you to provide a better experience for your customers by reducing latency and increasing transfer speed. It is high-performing, cost-effective and easy to use. Along with caching, Cloudfront also offers effective DDoS protection.

Akamai

Akamai focused to provide enterprise-level CDN service and DDoS mitigation for medium to large websites. Akamai has a managed CDN service called Aura. For beginners, Akamai can be bit hard but it is worth that.

Incapsula

Incapsula is another well-known CDN provider. They have a robust content delivery system and data centres spread all over the world. They also support HTTP/2 and instant cache purge.

Pricing

Incapsula is better suited for large businesses and enterprise clients. They do offer three plans starting from $59per site/month. If you have larger websites or have you can contact them to get a custom quote.

Features

They provide so many features including basic and advanced features such as DDoS protection, bad bot blocking, and they also caches dynamic and static content. They also offer load balancing and if you are an enterprise customer, you can avail priority support too.

CDN77

CDN77 is another famous CDN provider which offers great services for medium and established businesses. They have both monthly subscription plans and pay as you go plans.  They have 33 data centers spread across the world so that your website will load faster for customers across the world.

Plans

They have both pay as you plan and monthly payment options. If you use pay as you go plan, you only pay for what you use. However, you need to add a minimum prepaid credit of $149/year and your usage charges are deducted from this credit.

Their monthly plans starting from $199 which allows 6TB usage. Their biggest plan comes costs $999/month and allows 100TB usage.

Choose a plan wisely. If you are a small business onwer, probably pay as you go plan suits better for you.

Features

They provide so many features like HTTPS/2 server push and Brotli compression. They also offer easy integration with famous CMS scripts such as WordPress and Joomla for easy implementation. Along with these, they offer various security features and an easy to use control panel.

Edgecast

Edgecast is the CDN service from Verizon. They provide good CDN service which includes Web application Firewall (WAF) and Anti-DDoS protection etc. They offer great security, Great optimization.

If you are looking for a top-notch, enterprise CDN service, Edgecast can be the solution for your needs.