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What are the best content delivery networks (CDNs)?

20

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88

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Recs.

Apr 8, 2018

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

18 Options Considered

Best content delivery networks (CDNs)	Price	Last Updated
82 CloudFlare	-	May 5, 2017
71 CloudFront	-	Oct 27, 2016
-- MaxCDN	-	Apr 30, 2017
-- jsDelivr	-	Apr 8, 2018
-- Akamai	-	Oct 6, 2016

CloudFlare

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Top Con

Practices Man-in-the-Middle certificate forgery

Https ("secure") comunications with sites using CloudFlare are intercepted at their servers, decrypted and recrypted with CloudFlare's certificates. This poses huge problem with what users perceive as safe communication - browsers fail to display notice about MitM taking place. See More

Top Pro

Very affordable

CloudFlare offers a free plan with basic DDoS protection and promises to always provide a free service with at least the feature set that it has today. More advanced DDoS protection is available for the higher plans, which can be added as your needs grow. See More

Top Con

Lowers usability of the web for Tor users

Tor users are required to enter captcha at each site using CloudFlare. In some circumstances, this introduces unsolvable roadblock. See More

Top Pro

Works with static and dynamic content

Top Con

Relies on intrusive captcha screens to validate visitors

During large attacks, Cloudflare will block users with captcha screens to filter out malicious attacks. Albeit effective, they cause a considerable annoyance to legitimate users. See More

Top Pro

Easy management interface

Top Con

Slow support

Even on paid (Pro) account, support often takes several hours per reply. So a single query can take days to resolve. See More

Top Pro

Highly secure

Top Con

Support doesn't have access to logs

Log access is an enterprise feature and priced at the "contact us" level. So when an error code is returned to the user that wasn't returned from your app, debugging this is impossible at the pro level. Unfortunately these logs aren't available to support personnel either so they have no way of tracking/validating issues. See More

Top Pro

Anyone can add or update libraries

Top Con

Lack of cache control

If you want to cache all kinds of content (e.g. HTML, JSON), you need the "Cache Everything" setting, and this imposes a long "max-age" directive of 2 hours. It ignores your origin server's value. See More

Top Pro

Has npm auto-update

Top Con

Layer 7 attacks must be manually identified

In order to enable layer 7 protection with Cloudflare, customers must manually press an "I'm under attack" button. See More

Top Pro

Site enhancing apps

Cloudflare has a wide selection of app support that allows the user to install the app easily through Cloudflare instead of in their site. This creates ease of use, time saved and less degradation of performance. See More

Top Pro

Works with other CDNs

Top Pro

Automatic IPv6

Top Pro

Page Rules are powerful

Top Pro

Railgun optimization for Business & Enterprise plans

Railgun allows caching dynamic and personalized sites, allowing for up to 140% performance increase. See More

Top Pro

SSL encryption

As of late 2014 Cloudflare offers SSL encryption for all sites using its service. See More

Top Pro

Handled some of the largest DDoS attacks in history

Cloudflare was able to deflect 2 massive DDoS attacks. During the March 2013 attack on Spamhaus, they were able to absorb a peak 120Gbps attack that lasted 4 days, as well as a 400Gbps attack in February 2014. Their track record shows their ability to protect against DDoS attacks in practice. See More

Top Pro

Official WordPress plugin

Cloudflare offers an official WordPress plugin that allows for customization through the user panel. See More

Top Pro

Has tag based cache spoilage for Enterprise plan

Top Pro

Free service is Best

Akamai

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Top Pro

Lots of dedicated bandwidth specifically for DDoS absorption

Through Prolexic's PLXedge, Akamai provides their customers with a total of 2.3 Tbps of dedicated DDoS absorption bandwidth. See More

Top Con

Expensive

Akami's services cost more than triple comparative packages from other security companies. At 13k a month for DDoS protection, there are many other choices out there that cost less for the same protection. See More

Top Pro

Any type of content

Static, dynamic and streaming content delivery. See More

Top Con

Slower security rule propagation

Because of Akamai's large CDN structure, it can take some time for security rules to propagate, making it harder to adjust security responses on the fly. See More

Top Pro

Application protection

Akamai utilizes a proprietary web application firewall in order to provide scalable protection against application layer attacks. See More

Top Pro

Large scale point of presence

Being one of the worlds largest CDNs, Akamai's large scale gives it a huge point of presence (PoP) to handle volumetric attacks. See More

CDN77.com

Top Pro

Very easy to use

CDN77 is organized into a few tabs (dashboard, CDN, reports, support), which can quickly be accessed through buttons top dead center of the page. Setting it up is very easy as well, with just a few basic steps - create your storage, show CDN77 where your files are, then start using it. See More

Top Con

Doesn't allow for much user-customization

CDN77 lacks any advanced configuration options, making it a poor choice for any users wanting to do anything out-of-the-norm. See More

Imperial Play Developer Admin's Experience

Just took over managing this from a previous employee so I was needing some tech support and explanations. On a public holiday, on-line chat was answered immediately and carefully explained everything clearly. It's that level of support that makes the difference. See More

Top Pro

Cost-effective monthly plans

You can choose between Pay-As-You-Go and Worldwide Monthly Plans - with a fixed price for all locations, starting at $19/TB. See More

og1's Experience

Excellent POP coverage and network performance. Great user interface. See More

Top Pro

Strong and responsive support team

Support helped with a migration from another provider and made the process seamless. See More

Top Pro

Great user interface

Much clearer and easier to use than e.g. AWS. See More

Top Pro

Only pay for the data you use

Pricing starts at 49¢/GB, and will drop down to 29¢/GB if you receive lots of traffic. See Pay As You Go plan details here. If you have lots of traffic, instead you can opt for monthly plans which offer up to 2PB for just under $15,000/month. Check out High Volume plans here. See More

Top Pro

Extensive global network coverage

Good global network coverage in both North America and Europe. See More

KeyCDN

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Top Pro

Transparent, pay-as-you-go pricing

Traffic prices are as low as $0.04/GB and volume pricing starts at 10TB/month. See More

Top Con

Unreasonable anti-spam policy

Not suitable if you have an association with online advertising. A single email that may include your domain that appears on Spamcop will result in a threat to terminate your account and a requirement to disable the URL -- even if you are not responsible for the production or sending of the email. See More

Top Pro

Simple and easy setup

CDN configuration is instantly deployed. See More

Top Con

Config changes take 5-10 minutes

Any config change is queued for several minutes before being applied, without any time estimate. Combined with caching and DNS delays, it can make debugging a bit more difficult. See More

Top Pro

Free Lets Encrypt SSL certificates for custom zone names

Top Pro

HTTP/2 Support

One of the 1st providers to support HTTP/2 See More

Top Pro

Custom SSL for free

Allows uploading own certificate at no extra cost. Shared SSL is also available. See More

Top Pro

Brotli support

KeyCDN supports Brotli compression for users who have Brotli enabled on their origin server. See More

Top Pro

POPs in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan at no extra cost

Top Pro

Real-time raw logs available for free

Top Pro

Support SPDY 3.1

KeyCDN supports SPDY 3.1 for even faster secured connections. See More

Incapsula

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Top Pro

Real time dashboard

Incapsula provides a dashboard that shows traffic data in real time, allowing you to respond to threats immediately as they happen, and see the results of your response as quickly as possible. See More

Top Con

Enterprise package pricing not listed

Potential enterprise customers will need to call Incapsula to find out the pricing for their enterprise plans as they are not listed on the site and appear to be priced on a case by case basis. See More

Top Pro

Massive network capacity

Incapsula's proprietary "Behemoth" machines handle 170 Gbps each, and process up to 100 million packets per second. As of March 10th 2015, they have a network of 13 data centers with these machines, allowing them to process more than 2 Tbps of bandwidth on top of their existing capabilities. See More

Top Con

Scripting language and rules for IncapRules has steep learning curve

While there is a rules editor that offers a shortcut into rule definition, the learning curve to master how to utilize in full IncapRules is pretty steep. See More

Top Pro

24x7 chat support

Incapsula chat support is always available. Chat can be much easier to use than phone support, as you can easily copy and paste technical data through text, and get instant feedback you don't get through email. See More

Top Pro

Protects non-web assets

Incapsula has an extra layer of DDoS protection that also protects subnet network infrastructure, like FTP and email. See More

Top Pro

Great value for the price

For a full ADC package Incapsula comes in at 4k a month, compared the Akami's 13-14k, it is quite the bargain. See More

Top Pro

Instant propagation of security rules

Incapsula uses their own GUI called In IncapRules that allows for testing and implementation of user created rules, all on the fly. See More

Top Pro

Intelligently recognizes bots to counter layer 7 attacks

Incapsula has a bot recognition engine to achieve a low rate of false positives on layer 7 attacks. These attacks are notoriously hard to detect as they are designed to look like regular network traffic. Their always on recognition solution automatically triggers layer 7 protection without user intervention, protecting you during downtimes like holidays, weekends, and late nights. See More

Fastnow

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Top Pro

Enhances your website performance and delivers your contents to end users significantly and greatly

cdnjs

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Microsoft Ajax CDN

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Top Pro

Visual Studio .vsdoc support

Top Pro

Supports SSL

Google Hosted Libraries

BootstrapCDN

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