In an era where every business is going online, competition is getting fierce, and every second starts to matter. Every microsecond started to become extremely important, success started to get defined by margin of a microseconds.
As a website owner, you have taken extreme care when choosing your web host. You might have chosen the best onshore web hosting, and might have opted for the absolute best VPS available at the time. Yet, if your business grows beyond the borders and your business starts to serve a fraternity that is in the opposite part of the world, you need to keep your performance intact.
This is where CDN (Content Delivery Networks) starts to play. CDNs are a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. Their goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing services spatially relative to the users. CDN came into existence during the late 1990s, when the internet started to become mission critical for businesses, to alleviate the performance bottleneck.
What are the benefits of having CDNS?
- Improving website load times – distributing contents closer to website visitors by using a nearby CDN server can highly reduce website loading time. Improved website loading time can highly reduce the bounce rates, and increase the amount of time people spend on the site. In simple words, a faster visitor attracts more visitors and they stick around longer.
- Reducing bandwidth costs – The server costs increase proportionally with visitors, and with the type of hosting Stakque Infotech uses for the client, it is important to use caching and other optimization that CDN employs. CDNs can efficiently reduce bandwidth costs.
- Increasing content availability and redundancy – When compared to origin servers, CDN servers can withstand more incoming traffic, thanks to their distributed nature. Although, CDNs can be an SPF (Single point of failure).
- Improving website security – CDN may improve website security by several optimizations and may be by employing DDoS mitigation etc. Also, since the end-users are interacting more with the edge servers for the static content, the origin server has a reduced chance of catching errors and becoming prone to attacks
In this list, we uses the CDNPerf‘s ranking to order the list of the CDNs. CDNPerf ranks the CDNs according to the query speed.
Google Cloud CDN
Google Cloud CDN leverages Google’s globally distributed edge caches to accelerate content delivery for websites and applications out of Google Compute Engine. Google’s expertise in the building the best servers helps the websites to consistantly reduce the server costs by offloading origin.
Akamai CDN
One of the oldest CDN provider, operating out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Akamai has been one of the fastest CDN provider throughout their service history. Their edge CDN provides 100% uptime service-level agreement gives a peace of mind of their clients.
jsDelivr CDN
Unlike other CDNs in this list, this CDN only delivers javascript files for popular npm, GitHub, WordPress plugins, and custom endpoints for several other projects with special requirements. They are supported by 4 famous CDN providers including Cloudflare, Stackpath, Fastly, QUANTIL and 2 DNS providers. Which makes it a solid CDN to use to speed up your WordPress plugins.
Verizon (Edgecast) CDN
Verizon acquired the Edgecast CDN in 2013, which continues serve customers with the same might as Edgecast CDN used to. Now known as Verizon EdgeCast Content Delivery Network is world’s only native multi-CDN intelligence layer. Verizon uses a partnership model which enables them to serve from thousands of different locations which reduces the “hops” your data has to make.
CDNetworks
Originally based out of Hong Kong, a two decades of experience providing impeccable CDN services to their clients. CDNetworks served high profile clients like Hyundai, Forbes and Samsung. CDNetworks is now providing a free traffic usage for up to $50, with no commitment, no credit card. This is a best way to test their services.
Azure CDN
Providing deep integration like no other with Azure services like Web Apps, Media Services, Storage, and Cloud Services. According to Microsoft, the providers of Azure CDN, they invest 1 Million USD on security research and that makes them a safe bet for business owners searching for a good CDN provider. Azure CDN also integrates with Akamai(Another impeccable CDN provider) and Verizon.
Cloudflare CDN
Cloudflare provides a host of web performance improvement services like free CDN, DDoS mitigation, preemptive security measures, WAF (Web Application Firewall) and excellent integration with CMS of our choice, WordPress.
For people who use WordPress, Cloudflare also provides free SSL. Cloudflare also supports HTTP2/Server Push which can gain massive performance improvements.
AWS Cloudfront CDN
If your web application is built on Amazon’s cloud, look nowhere else. Amazon CloudFront is integrated with AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, and AWS Elemental Media Services. AWS Cloudfront has a massive 217(at the time of writing) point of presence (PoPs) across the globe, which helps with the availability and performance of the websites with them.
Fastly CDN
Fastly describes their services as edge cloud computing platform, which means web owners can extend their core cloud computing service to the edge servers, closer to the users. Founded in 2011, Fastly became one of the most prominent CDN providers in the world. Giants like Google has partnered with Fastly to realize their CDN infrastructure.
BunnyCDN
BunnyCDN is the CDN of our choice, Stakque Infotech Pvt. Ltd. has their CDN system integrated with the BunnyCDN. Although they are relatively newer entrants to the CDN business. They perform well.
