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What are the best content delivery networks (CDNs)?

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18 Options Considered

18 Options ConsideredPriceLast Updated
CloudFlare
May 5, 2017
CloudFront
Oct 27, 2016
MaxCDN
Apr 30, 2017
jsDelivr
Apr 8, 2018
Akamai
Oct 6, 2016
See Full List

CloudFlare

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thermoplastics
Andris Pelcbergs
Svemir Brkic
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.
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Works with static and dynamic content

•••
Keepo Admini
Top Pro

Easy management interface

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Highly secure

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Anyone can add or update libraries

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Has npm auto-update

•••
thermoplastics
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
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.
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Works with other CDNs

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Automatic IPv6

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Page Rules are powerful

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Railgun optimization for Business & Enterprise plans

•••
Railgun allows caching dynamic and personalized sites, allowing for up to 140% performance increase.
thermoplastics
Top Pro

SSL encryption

•••
As of late 2014 Cloudflare offers SSL encryption for all sites using its service.
thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Official WordPress plugin

•••
Cloudflare offers an official WordPress plugin that allows for customization through the user panel.
Tim Etler
Top Pro

Has tag based cache spoilage for Enterprise plan

•••
Keepo Admini
Top Pro

Free service is Best

•••
daddy32
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.
daddy32
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.
thermoplastics
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.
Michael Mahemoff
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.
thermoplastics
Shai Almog
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...
Michael Mahemoff
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.
Laura Kyle
thermoplastics
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 21 more Pros & ConsSee 21 more Pros & Cons

CloudFront

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Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Dynamic scaling

•••
CloudFront will allocate more hardware resources when needed automatically. It will take care of traffic spikes and accommodate product's growth without needing manual input from the user.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Any type of content

•••
CloudFront can deliver dynamic, static and streaming content.
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Simple interface

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Tight integration with other Amazon Web Services

•••
CloudFront integrates tightly with Amazon's storage, computing, database and networking services allowing you to use a tested and cohesively developed set of solutions.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Con

Can get expensive quickly

•••
See 3 more ProsSee 3 more Pros

MaxCDN

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Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Powerful tools

•••
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

100% uptime

•••
MaxCDN promises an uptime of 100%.
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Popular blogging, ecommerce and plugin solutions

•••
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

HTTP and RTMP support

•••
HTTP and RTMP variant audio and video streaming.
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

NetDNA uses the Packet Exchange backbone

•••
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Real-time live streaming support

•••
Real-time live streaming support using Wowza Media Server Advanced 2 clusters.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
See 5 more ProsSee 5 more Pros

jsDelivr

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Patricia Q
Burak
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Multi-CDN

•••
jsDelivr uses multiple CDN providers resulting in better uptime and performance.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Free and open source

•••
jsDelivr offers free CDN services for developers.
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Effective load balancing

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Version aliasing

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Multiple files via single HTTP request

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Fully featured API

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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Akamai

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thermoplastics
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.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Any type of content

•••
Static, dynamic and streaming content delivery.
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Application protection

•••
Akamai utilizes a proprietary web application firewall in order to provide scalable protection against application layer attacks.
thermoplastics
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
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.
thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
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 4 more Pros & ConsSee 4 more Pros & Cons

CDN77.com

HardwareHero
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.
Chloe Montanez
Alex
Havlik Tom
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.
NobleStataMater
Top Pro

Strong and responsive support team

•••
Support helped with a migration from another provider and made the process seamless.
Kristaps
App Family AB
Top Pro

Great user interface

•••
Much clearer and easier to use than e.g. AWS.
Clarinois
HardwareHero
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.
Monika
og1
Top Pro

Extensive global network coverage

•••
Good global network coverage in both North America and Europe.
HardwareHero
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 5 more ProsSee 5 more Pros

KeyCDN

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Andris Pelcbergs
John Smith
Top Pro

Transparent, pay-as-you-go pricing

•••
Traffic prices are as low as $0.04/GB and volume pricing starts at 10TB/month.
Andris Pelcbergs
Markus Müller
Top Pro

Simple and easy setup

•••
CDN configuration is instantly deployed.
CulturedErsa
Top Pro

Free Lets Encrypt SSL certificates for custom zone names

•••
Brian Jackson
Top Pro

HTTP/2 Support

•••
One of the 1st providers to support HTTP/2
Andris Pelcbergs
John Smith
Top Pro

Custom SSL for free

•••
Allows uploading own certificate at no extra cost. Shared SSL is also available.
Laura Kyle
Cody Arsenault
Top Pro

Brotli support

•••
KeyCDN supports Brotli compression for users who have Brotli enabled on their origin server.
Markus Müller
John Smith
Top Pro

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

•••
John Smith
Top Pro

Real-time raw logs available for free

•••
Andris Pelcbergs
Markus Müller
Top Pro

Support SPDY 3.1

•••
KeyCDN supports SPDY 3.1 for even faster secured connections.
ReceptiveWollunqua
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.
Michael Mahemoff
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 9 more Pros & ConsSee 9 more Pros & Cons

Incapsula

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thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
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 capabi...
thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Protects non-web assets

•••
Incapsula has an extra layer of DDoS protection that also protects subnet network infrastructure, like FTP and email.
thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
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 in...
thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
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 7 more Pros & ConsSee 7 more Pros & Cons

CacheFly

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Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

30-day trial

•••
CacheFly offers a 30-day trial.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Service level agreement guarantees 100% abailability

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Scalable delivery

•••
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Reverse Proxy and SSL Support

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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Fastnow

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Chloe Montanez
Taewon Park
Top Pro

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

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?

Windows Azure

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Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Flexible and easy

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Ensured uptime

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Reliable

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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cdnjs

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Level3

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Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Unified Communications technology

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Level3 offers a front end optimisation service

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Powerful video encoding suite

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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CDNetworks

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Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

PCI certified

•••
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

SSL-VPN application support

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Only multinational CDN

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Secure

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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BitGravity

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Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Robust analytics engine

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Stream bandwidth optimization

•••
Patricia Q
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Region control

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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Microsoft Ajax CDN

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Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Visual Studio .vsdoc support

•••
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Supports SSL

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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CDNsun

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Alan Delval
Top Pro

HTTP/2 Support

•••
Supports HTTP/2 ON SSL connections
Endi Sukaj
Alan Delval
Top Pro

Good help section with useful examples on

•••
Endi Sukaj
Alan Delval
Top Pro

Detailed statistics

•••
Alan Delval
Top Pro

Highly configurable

•••
Endi Sukaj
Alan Delval
Top Con

It's a bit hard to use a Let's Encrypt certificate

•••
It only lets you to use Let's Encrypt with Push, and to use it with Pull you need to create one manually from your computer.
See 3 more ProsSee 3 more Pros

StackPath

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Laura Kyle
Will Andre
Top Pro

Flat pricing

•••
Easy to understand the pricing of their CDNs.
Will Andre
Top Pro

Free WAF and DDoS

•••
Hard to beat the value for some security and CDN.
Laura Kyle
Will Andre
Top Con

Not many services yet

•••
Not really a con, just really good secure content delivery right now, but hopefully they will add more services soon.
See 1 more ProSee 1 more Pro
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82 Community Recommendations

Travis Rigg
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gabeio
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+50
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Imperial Play Developer Admin
Imperial
Contributor for 23 days
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50
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CDN77.com
Recommended 23 days ago
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.
Pro
 Very easy to use
Pro
 Strong and responsive support team
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og1
og1
Contributor for 3 months
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Total 
Recs.
15
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CDN77.com
Recommended 3 months ago
Excellent POP coverage and network performance. Great user interface.
Pro
 Very easy to use
Pro
 Great user interface
Pro
 Strong and responsive support team
Pro
 Extensive global network coverage
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