Are you a webmaster and planning to build a ultra-fast website that is reliable, scalable, secure, and fit to use at any scale? If yes, then, you are in the perfect article as in this article, we are going to discuss every aspect of CDN.
What is CDN?
CDN stands for Content Distribution Network. It refers to the geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
Let’s talk with the example:
You have a visitor located in Patna (Bihar India) and the server is located in Banglore. Then, the time taken by the user to open your website hosted in
It helps you to transfer the static assets of your website from your Server to your Local Computer at a very rapid scale. The assets include HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.
CDN also helps to secure your web server from the DDOS attack through the origin shield.
Is a CDN the same as a web host?
For the majority of our minds, this simple question always arises and the answer to this question is No.
Basically, CDN uses to store a static portion of the website as they are not able to connect with the mother database of your website. This database base connection only happens when a human or bot loads your website in the browser.
What are the benefits of using a CDN?
The benefit of the CDN uses to vary from project to Project. While we have categorized the whole benefits of the CDN into four parts. These four-part are discussed below in a very detailed manner:
- Webpage Loading Speed: It is basic and most important functionality of a CDN. It enhance the user exprience by By distributing content closer to website visitors by using a nearby CDN server (among other optimizations), visitors experience faster page loading times.
- More finanacly sustaning: It help you decrease the maintainace cost of the server by decreasing the bandwidth cost as well as processing power of the CDN.
- Increasing content availability and redundancy: Many of our server use face hardware failure that causes unavilibilty of your website to your users.
- Security: Content Distrubtion Network help you to secure your website from DDOS websites by mitigations.
How does a Content Distribution Network work?
A content Distribution Network is a network of servers linked together with the goal of delivering content as quickly, cheaply, reliably, and securely. The servers of the content distribution network are located in between internet exchange points.
What to Look for in a CDN?
Before we move ahead, we should clarify what properties we are going to look at while considering a CDN. If I talk about myself, I only rely on the following properties:
Performance:
The Performance of Content Delivery Network has mainly Three pillars named latency, Uptime and POP-servers. You should consider the Point of presence server is located. For example, if your primary visitors are from India, then, 2 or more than 2 CDN servers must be located in India or boundary countries.
Uptime is very crucial for you and your website as a website that has very low uptime(less than 99%) will put you in the critical zone of performance.
Security:
Out of every 12 web requests, 1 request is a malware attack and the DDOS attack is the most dangerous attack faced by the servers. So, you must consider security features like origin shield, DDOS protection and many more.
Transparent Pricing:
I hate those services whose pricing is opaque as you do not have the prediction of the cost.
Customer Support:
A Non-techy person like us does not know the technical part of the CDN. So, it is very needy to have customer support that is fast, knowledgable, and supportive.
Let’s talk about the best Content Distribution network offered around the Globe.
Best CDN Network offered around the Globe.
There are too many content distribution networks are available around the Globe. Out of these networks, we have listed the best and most affordable network. These networks are listed below:
| CDN Provider | Free trial | Points of Presence (POPs) | Paid | Latency |
| Cloudflare | YES | 200+ | $20/m | 37ms |
| StackPath | No | 45+ | $10/m | 36ms |
| Sucuri | NO | 12 | $199/m | 200+ |
| KeyCDN | 14 days | 43 | $4/m | 50ms |
| Yes | Unknown | $4/m | 100ms | |
| Fastly | Yes | 59 | $50/m | 33ms |
| GCP | YES | 200+ | $1/m | 25ms |
| AWS | YES | 210+ | $1/m | 27ms |
| YEs | 54+ | $1/m | 35ms | |
| YES | 20 | $21/m | 65+ |
Let us discuss these CDN in a very detailed manner:
BunnyCDN :
In this journey of webmastership, I found BunnyCDN as the most efficient, reliable, pocket-friendly, and secure CDN network. It offers features like Website Acceleration, Edge Storage, Software distribution, and Dynamic Image processing.
If we talk about its pricing, I must say it is a predictable, Pocket-friendly Content Delivery Network with more than 55 pops available around the globe. Its highly distributed Content Delivery Network is available around the globe(6 continents).
Pricing:
The pricing for CDNs uses to cost $0.01/GB for Europe and North America, $0.03/Gb for Asia and Oceania, $0.045/GB for South America and $0.06/GB for Middle East and Africa.
The pricing for image processing used to cost $10/website.
BunnyCDN uses to offer 5 EDGE storage available around the 5 Locations named Falkenstein, New York, Los Angle, Singapore and Sydney. The pricing ranges between 0.01$ to 0.03$ depending on the location of the server.
Letancy:
The latency of BunnyCDN is Good. The average latency I found during the detailed review is approx 40ms.
Customer Support:
The Customer support of BunnyCDN is really fast as I get the average response within 3s.
AWS:
Amazon Cloud Service use to offer CloudFront which is a highly reliable, Secure, Low Latency Cloud Distribution Network with more than 214+ Points of Presence available around the Globe. It is the solution for the big players of the market like Hulu, Discovery, Canon, and many other.
Pricing:
Cloudfront use to charge in a range of $0.085 to $0.120 per GB which is pretty high in respect to other CDN providers. However, the latency offered by AWS makes it one of the leading and most demanding CDN solutions.
Support:
The support and UI offered by Cloudfront are for techy people as they offer support only to big players of the market. The average cost of support offered by the was use to start from $4000 per month.
GCP:
Google Cloud Platform use to offer CDN solutions to webmasters around the globe. It is very different from the CDN solution like
Pricing:
The pricing of GCP CDN is pretty low in comparison to premium CDN networks like Cloudfront. The pricing of GCP ranges between $0.09 to $0.20 per GB. The biggest CACHE with google CDN is “GCP CDN only integrate servers hosted in google cloud unlike other support any managed or unmanaged hosting solution like Microhost,
Support:
The support of Google Cloud Platform is pretty fast but have to more than $1000 per month for the support.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare is a DNS level caching system used by more than 25% of websites around the globe and reaches almost every Internet user. It has more than 200+ points of presence around the globe.
Pricing:
Cloudflare uses to offer a free solution as a paid solution that’s why pricing starts from $0 per month and goes up to 200$ per month. The system is too much opaque.
Support:
Your support depends only on the plan you have opted for as a free plan does not have robust support while the business plan has 24*7 phone support.
