Top CDN Providers for Websites

Last updated on July 26th, 2024 at 06:08 am

CDN Providers or Content Delivery Networks allow you to improve website speed and performance by keeping cached copies of your website across a network of servers. This allows you to deliver static files like CSS, JS, Images and more from one of their servers located near the geographical location of your website visitor. Here are the top 5 CDN Providers for websites, blogs and applications.

What is a CDN Provider

CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of web servers that store and cache different types of web content across numerous geographic locations. When users request a URL on a website served by a CDN, the web page and its contents are served by the CDN node server closest to the user’s geo location. This results in fast user experience. CDN can be used to cache images, media files as well as static CSS, JS files. They are commonly used by high traffic websites to serve requests.

Benefits of CDN Provider

CDN Providers offer several benefits such as:

1. Improved Speed – Most obvious benefit of using CDN is improved website speed. This is because in most cases, each request is served from a CDN node geographically closest to the user.
2. Reduced server load – Since your content is cached across multiple servers across the world, only the most essential requests actually reach your main web servers for processing. In most cases, the user requests are directly served by one of the CDN nodes.
3. Better Security – Since your content is replicated across multiple servers, it protects your site from malicious attacks such as DDOS (distributed denial of service). In this case, if one node goes down, the content can be served via other servers.
4. Reduced costs – Since most requests are served using cached content, it reduces costs of network bandwidth and running server.
   

Top CDN Providers for Websites

Here are the best CDN providers you can use for websites, blogs and even applications.

1. Akamai

Akamai is one of the most robust CDN providers on the internet. They provide a CDN network with more than 4000 servers spanning over 1200 networks across 130 countries. They offer scalable, state-of-the-art content delivery with accompanied features.

They are widely used for streaming audio and video files by leading social media networks. Their solutions not only provide content caching and delivery but also offer many security solutions to protect your site and content from DDOS and other attacks. They also provide performance monitoring and testing to help you understand how your content is being delivered so you can easily optimize it.

Their CDN helps you deliver a world class user experience irrespective of their device or location.

2. CloudFlare

CloudFlare is one of the most popular CDN providers that is used by many websites all over the world. It also has a free plan without any bandwidth limitations.

Cloudflare has over 180 data centers all over the world, and makes it easy to cache your website content, and quickly serve it to your website visitors. It also offers a robust control panel with fine grain options.

Their free plan is great for small websites, blogs and startups. Their paid plans start from $20/month and offer robust security features such as DDOS protection, spam protection and anti-malware.

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3. KeyCDN

KeyCDN is one of the best CDN providers that easily integrates with popular website builders and CMS systems such as WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla.

Its payment plans are based on your website traffic. So you don’t need to pay much till your website traffic takes off.

KeyCDN has 34 data centers and offers many useful features such as real-time reports, gzip compression, two-factor authentication, DDOS protection, instant purge, and more. Their paid plans start from $0.04/GB.

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4. RackSpace

Rackspace is a popular cloud computing service that allows you to improve performance of ecommerce websites, web applications and other websites.

It also offers pay as you go pricing, starting from $0.16/GB. Rackspace has more than 200 data centers around the world. So it offers great availability and speed.

However, it does not offer DDOS protection at the moment. Nevertheless, it is a powerful infrastructure.

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5. Google Cloud CDN

Did you know Google also offers a low-cost CDN, called Google Cloud CDN? It uses Google’s infrastructure and has over 90 data centers all over the world.

It offers free SSL certificate and easily integrates with Google Cloud Platform. They even provide $300 credit to test their service over a period of 12 months.

Google Cloud CDN is a great option for small websites, blogs and web applications. However, it can be a little difficult to configure compared to other CDNs.

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6. Amazon Cloudfront

Amazon Cloudfront is a high-speed CDN by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is well-integrated with other AWS services.

It is capable of delivering static as well as dynamic content. Its pricing varies by region but you can pay as you go.

Amazon Cloudfront’s focus is on delivering content fast, at affordable pricing. If you are looking for a high-performance CDN then Amazon Cloudfront is worth a try.

7. Azure CDN

Azure CDN is a service provided by Microsoft for scalable content delivery. It is commonly used by gaming companies, streaming sites and other businesses for software & firmware updates.

It offers a wide range of edge servers that distribute the incoming requests according to users’ geo location. This reduces server load and improved user experience without increasing costs.

Azure CDN is often used for new product launches due to its reliability and Microsoft’s reputation. It provides seamless integration with other Azure services, and also features a suite of services for improved security. It also allows you to customize your content to specific geographies by using location based rules.

Overall, it provides a reliable, scalable and robust CDN suitable for businesses of all industries.

Conclusion

Once your website picks up traffic beyond a threshold, it is advisable to serve most of its contents using CDN. There are many reputed and reliable CDN providers who have been in business for decades. They handle some of the most popular websites on the internet. However, it is important to evaluate each CDN service and pick the one that meets your requirements and fits your budgets. Hopefully, this article will help you find a suitable CDN provider for your website, blog or web application.