who are cdn providers?

Before we get to the 25 Best CDN Providers 2023 list, I wanted to highlight some of the Best Startup/Business CDNs, Best Enterprise-class CDNs and Best Free CDNs.

Image source: CDNPerf.

NOTE: The first five providers are sorted by the CDN’s I’ve interacted with the most. All others are sorted alphabetically.

Cloudflare is a web performance and security company that provides online services to protect and accelerate websites online. Its online platforms include Cloudflare CDN that distributes content around the world to speed up websites, Cloudflare optimizer that enables web pages with ad servers and third-party widgets to download Snappy software on mobiles and computers, CloudFlare security that protects websites from a range of online threats, including spam, SQL injection, and DDOS, Cloudflare analytics that gives insight into website’s traffic including threats and search engine crawlers, Keyless SSL that allows organizations to keep secure sockets layer (SSL) keys private, and Cloudflare applications that help its users install web applications on their websites.

Plans start at $0 per month (free).

BunnyCDN is a simple and powerful CDN, offering lightning-fast performance for a fraction of the cost with free SSL, Brotli, HTTP/2, and 100% Pay As You Go pricing. This blog uses BunnyCDN.

Free 14 day trial, then from $0.01 /GB.

G-Core Labs is a content delivery network (CDN) and cloud services provider focusing on the media business and entertainment industries. The company was founded in 2011. G-Core Labs is borne out of strong roots in the online gaming industry and the success in building the infrastructure for Wargaming. “G-Core” is “Gaming-Core.” This infrastructure was awarded by the Guinness Book of Records for the most simultaneous online players on a single MOG server (190,541 users).  In 2014 another record was set with its content delivery network sustaining a load of 1,114,000 simultaneous players. The company is headquartered in Luxembourg, has offices in Germany, Lithuania, CIS.

Try for free. It starts at $0/mo.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) offered by Amazon Web Services. CloudFront has servers located in Europe (United Kingdom, Ireland, The Netherlands, Germany, Spain), Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, and India), Australia, South America, and several major cities in the United States. The service operates from well over 100 edge locations in five continents. CloudFront works on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Free Tier for one year or pay as you go.

Content Delivery Network based on Google’s globally distributed edge points of presence. As of June 2018, the service is in Beta. Highly scalable and reliable infrastructure. By operating an extensive global network of interconnection points, we can bring Google traffic closer to our peers, reducing their costs and providing users with a better experience. Present on over 90 internet exchanges and at over 100 interconnection facilities around the world.

Calculate pricing.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American content delivery network (CDN) and cloud service provider with one of the world’s largest distributed computing platforms, responsible for serving between 15% and 30% of all web traffic. The company operates a network of servers worldwide and rents out capacity on these servers to customers who want their websites to work faster by distributing content from locations close to the user. When a user navigates to the URL of an Akamai customer, their browser is redirected to one of Akamai’s copies of the website.

Free Trial.

Alibaba Cloud develops highly scalable cloud computing and data management services. As the cloud computing arm and a business unit of Alibaba Group, It provides a comprehensive suite of global cloud computing services to power both our international customers’ online businesses and Alibaba Group’s e-commerce ecosystem. Its services are available on a pay-as-you-go basis and include data storage, relational databases, big-data processing, Anti-DDoS protection, and content delivery networks (CDN).

Free quote / Learn more.

Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN provides optimized, software-defined network connectivity and application acceleration to globally distributed enterprises. Aryaka’s services have over 10 million users across more than 4,000 sites. Leading brands such as Skullcandy, Air China, Freescale Semiconductor, and ThoughtWorks, as well as partners such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Intelisys, and SK Broadband, have all chosen Aryaka for their enterprise-grade networking needs.

Request a quote.

BelugaCDN works similar to Amazon CloudFront or MaxCDN, allowing you to accelerate the delivery of your site’s content (images, videos, etc.) by leveraging the power of a global cloud.

Plans start at $5 per month.

BootstrapCDN is a public content delivery network. Users of BootstrapCDN can load CSS, JavaScript, and images remotely from its servers, and it’s been used by more than 7.9 million websites worldwide (including 30% of the top-10k websites). It delivers more than 70 billion requests a month. Bootstrap uses StackPath’s global content delivery network, making websites using its service resilient to unexpected surges in web traffic.

Free – Learn more.

CDN77 is a privately held company based in London, UK. The company launched its CDN service in early 2012. The CDN77 network consists of 30+ global edge locations. CDN77 provides Website Acceleration, Software Distribution, Gaming, Video Delivery, and a tailored platform for Live Streaming. Latest technologies such as HTTP/2, free instant SSL, or Brotli compression offer a complete feature set. All features come at no additional costs and are available via API for every client.

Free 14-day trial, then pay as you go or from $199/mo.

CacheFly Content Delivery Network (CDN) delivers rich-media content up to 10x faster than single-hosting delivery. Launched in 2002 as the first TCP anycast-based CDN, CacheFly pioneered delivering rich-media content quicker and more reliably than traditional delivery methods. With a proven track record, a decade’s worth of experience, and over 2,000 clients in over 80 countries, organizations consistently choose CacheFly for scalability, reliability, and unbeatable performance.

It starts at $295/mo.

CDNJS is a freely available CDN for common Javascript and CSS libraries.

Learn more.

CDNetworks enables Global Cloud Acceleration. They help transform the Internet into a secure, reliable, scalable, and high performing Application Delivery Network. CDNetworks’ unique position as the only multinational CDN with expertise and infrastructure in China, Russia, and other emerging markets, enables them to be trusted partners in local markets while serving as foremost experts on extending into global markets. Accelerating more than 40,000 international websites and cloud services over our 140 PoPs, CDNetworks serves e-business customers across industries like finance, travel, eCommerce, learning management, high tech, manufacturing, and media. CDNetworks has offices in the U.S., Korea, China, Japan, and the UK.

Learn more.

CenterServ is a cloud services company managing an association of more than 2000 ethical certified system administrators and experts worldwide. CenterServ has two primary business lines, Cloud Servers and Dedicated Servers, offered globally, with over 200 locations! CenterServ helps design, build, and implement personalized services and offers cloud computing consulting services as part of their service agreements.

Learn more.

With Cloudinary, all images are seamlessly delivered through a fast CDN, optimized, and using industry best practices. Cloudinary is a cloud-based service that answers a website or mobile application’s entire image management needs – uploads, storage, manipulations, optimizations, and delivery. Cloudinary’s users can easily move all their website’s images to the cloud. Automatically perform smart image resizing, cropping, merging, overlay, watermark, apply effects, rotations, and perform format conversions.

Free forever plan (25 credits) or from $89/mo.

Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS) is an American company known for its content delivery network (CDN). The company was founded in 2006 as EdgeCast Networks, Inc and was funded by the venture arm of The Walt Disney Company, Steamboat Ventures. Edgecast is notable for being a self-provisioning CDN technology used by telecommunication and hosting industries.

Learn more.

Fastly describes its network as an edge cloud platform designed to help developers extend their core cloud infrastructure to the edge of the network, closer to users. The Fastly edge cloud platform includes its content delivery network, image optimization, video & streaming, cloud security, and load balancing services. Fastly was founded in 2011.

Learn more.

The free CDN package ensures a lifetime free CDN for startups and beginning webmasters. Free up to 10GB EU+USA or up to 5GB free for world traffic. Up to  48 PoPs (points of presence) located in 5 continents.

Free plans available or from $5 /mo or pay-as-you-go.

Imperva delivers an enterprise-grade Web Application Firewall to safeguard your site from the latest threats, and intelligent and instantly effective 360-degree anti-DDoS solutions (layers 3-4 and 7), a global CDN to speed up your website’s load speed and minimize bandwidth usage, and an array of performance monitoring and analytic services to provide insights about your website’s security and performance.

Get a quote.

JSDelivr (stylized as jsDelivr) is a free public CDN for open-source projects. It currently takes 3rd place as one of the most popular public CDNs globally (that hosts multiple projects). Now, it can serve web files directly from the npm registry and Github repositories without any configuration.

Free public CDN – Learn more.

KeyCDN is a high-performance Content Delivery Network (CDN). KeyCDN is a global CDN with its infrastructure and POPs in the US, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. They offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model with a competitive global flat rate.

Learn more.

Microsoft Azure CDN is a global content delivery network (CDN) for audio, video, applications, images, and other static files. It can be used to cache static assets of websites geographically closer to users to increase performance. Azure has 54 point-of-presence locations worldwide (also known as Edge locations) as of August 2018.

Learn More.

As one of the largest low-latency CDN networks, the Lumen® CDN enables reliable content delivery to users around the globe. That’s why many of the world’s leading media and eCommerce sites rely on our programmable edge and proven customer service to grow their businesses.

Learn more.

StackPath is an intelligent Web services platform for security, speed, and scale. More than 30,000 customers, ranging from Fortune 100 companies to early-stage startups, already use StackPath technology. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, StackPath has offices across the U.S. and internationally.

It starts at $10 per month, First Month Free.

Other user-submitted solutions… cdn.net, INAP, Onapp, Quantil, and Swarmify. Suggest others in the comments section below.

Also, see: 100 Server and Application Performance Monitoring Tools Cache Everything (Full Page Cache) to global CDN Locations

Disclosure: This blog uses BunnyCDN, and that listing includes an affiliate link that adds account credit.

Want to speed up your WordPress site and webpage load time? CDN companies (Content Delivery Network companies) can prove to be vital in boosting the performance of your website and user experiences.

In this article, we’ll compare the best CDN providers along with their pros and cons to help you speed up your website.

Here’s a list of our top picks for the fastest and most reliable CDNs.

StackPath is one of the best CDN providers in the market. They acquired MaxCDN a few years ago to strengthen their service.

It comes with multiple data centers across the world, so it helps you improve the loading speed of your website. Plus, it comes with a private EdgeSSL certificate for free with their plan.

Stackpath is very easy to set up and allows you to monitor real-time analytics. It also comes with features like an intelligent caching system, Gzip compression, 301 redirects, and much more.

Unlike most CDN providers, StackPath offers security services including load balancing and blocking features for DDoS protection, plus a web application firewall along with their CDN service. And you have the option to either purchase just the CDN service or buy their bundle of different services.

Price: StackPath offers different bundles and services at discounted rates. However, you can only purchase their CDN service at $10 per month.

Sucuri is a popular website security company that protects your site from hackers, DDoS attacks, and malware. You can use their WordPress plugin to monitor and scan your website for security issues.

Along with their security features, they also provide CDN service to help you optimize your website for speed. Optimization with site speed is super important for SEO and tons of other reasons.

They use the best hardware and technologies required to improve the performance of your site. And they offer multiple caching options for different types of websites.

You may check out the Sucuri review on our sister site IsItWP for detailed information.

Price: Starting from $199 per year for a single website.

Cloudflare is one of the most popular CDN providers among bloggers, small businesses, and professionals. It comes with a free plan with no limitation on bandwidth. So that makes it one of the best free CDN providers for WordPress.

They have more than 180 data centers around the world. This can prove to be useful to improve the performance, speed, and security of your website.

You can easily set up Cloudflare on your WordPress site. It’ll automatically cache the resources of your website, though you can purge or clear them from the control panel if you want.

One of the drawbacks of Cloudflare is you’ll have to upgrade to a premium plan to use all their security features, unlike other CDN services like StackPath and Sucuri.

Price: Free. If you need extra features, then you’ll have to upgrade to their premium plan starting from $20 per month.

KeyCDN is another popular CDN provider on our list. You can easily integrate it to your WordPress site by using the CDN Enabler plugin.

They offer “pay as you go” plans to their customers, which means you only pay for what you use. Though this can be useful for low-traffic websites, the monthly bill may increase if you receive a lot of traffic to your site.

Some of the important features of KeyCDN include Gzip compression, real-time reports, instant purge options, two-factor authentication, DDoS protection, and much more.

Price: Pay as you go, starting from $0.04 per GB

Rackspace is a popular managed and dedicated cloud computing service provider. They also offer CDN service to help you boost the performance of eCommerce sites, web applications, and other websites.

It uses the “pay as you go” pricing system just like KeyCDN. And you’ll have to pay $0.16 per GB to use their service.

Rackspace is built on powerful cloud infrastructure, so you can expect your WordPress site to be fast. Also, it’s present in more than 200 data centers around the world.

However, you should note that setting up Rackspace CDN is a bit complicated compared to other CDN providers on our list.

Price: Pay as you go, starting from $0.16 per GB

Google Cloud CDN is a low-cost content delivery service that uses Google’s global network. They have data centers at 90 locations around the world.

It comes with an SSL certificate at no additional cost to secure your website. You can also seamlessly integrate it with the Google Cloud Platform.

Apart from the above, you even have the option to use their $300 free trial credit to test their service over the next 90 days.

Price: “Pay as you go” pricing plans. They also offer a free trial to test their service.

CacheFly is one of the oldest CDN providers in the market. You can use their service for video streaming and podcast streaming without any hassle.

It comes with an easy-to-understand interface, so you can manage everything easily. They also offer security features including DDoS and malware protection to protect your website from hackers.

One of the disadvantages of CacheFly compared to other popular CDN providers is it’s very expensive. Their basic plan starts at $295 per month which is not suitable for most online businesses.

Price: Starting at $495 per month.

Amazon CloudFront is a popular CDN for websites offered by Amazon Web Services, especially because of its speed. Yes, it’s very fast, but it’s also very advanced. So, it may be better for programmers or developers instead of beginners.

Pros

Cons

Price: Pricing varies by location and is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis.

A CDN or Content Delivery Network is a network of servers that keeps a cached copy of your website on multiple servers.

When you use a CDN, your static content CSS files, javascript files, Flash, and more, is cached and stored on all of these servers spread around in different locations. This also helps with image optimization, with is a huge factor in increasing site speed.

And it delivers that copy as fast as possible by storing it on servers located in multiple geographical locations and routing your site visitors to the one that’s closest to them. This decreases latency for visitors from all over the world.

However, you should note that you still need a web hosting account to keep your website files. The job of the CDN provider is to keep the static resources of your website and not host your original website files.

Let us explain the concept of CDN with the help of an example.

Say, your WordPress site is hosted on Bluehost and the server of your Bluehost account is located in Los Angeles. When someone from London visits your site, the website files will be fetched from the server located in Los Angeles.

This may affect the loading time of your site. Also, the site speed will be affected by the increase in the number of requests made to a single server. This is where a CDN provider comes in handy. It keeps a static copy of your website in different locations across the world.

Thus, the visitor will be served with a cached copy of the website from the nearest CDN server and not the original files from your web host. This will help you to reduce the loading time of your website.

There are many different benefits to using a CDN, including:

Performance and security are both super important to the success of your website, so using a CDN is often worth it.

After comparing the pros and cons of the above services, we can conclude that StackPath is the best CDN provider in the market.

They offer useful features at an affordable rate to help you speed up your WordPress site. Plus, StackPath comes with security features to protect your site from malware, spam, and bad traffic.

Sucuri is another service that we can highly recommend. Though it’s popular for its security services, you can use their CDN service to boost the performance of your website.

And that’s it! We hope this article helped you choose the best CDN provider to speed up your WordPress site.

For those new to the technology, then it might seem somewhat intimidating, and there's no doubt that prices can be high, but don't be put off by these issues as a CDN is not just for a massive corporation. You see, the simplest CDN services can be configured in under five minutes, and by choosing your plan wisely, it just might not cost you anything at all.

Whatever your website, from a simple blog to a sprawling site for a big business, we've got you covered, and have picked out some of the best services around to point you in the right direction. When you find something that looks interesting,keep in kind that you can explore many of these CDNs for free, without handing over payment details or signing up for any contract.

We've compared these CDN providers across numerous factors, from their ease of setup and performance, and also their optimization tools and configurability. We also looked at their learning curve and pricing plans, among the many aspects.

We’ve also rounded up the best VPN services.

Cloudflare is a hugely popular American content delivery service that combines novice-friendly ease of use along with expert-level features and functionality. It’s no wonder that it is trusted by leading corporations including IBM, L’Oreal, Shopify and Panasonic.

Setup is simple, with no need to edit any code. Simply update your DNS nameservers to use Cloudflare, and the service kicks in automatically, caching content and serving it to visitors from their nearest location.

But there's also much, much more. Web filtering can block bots, limit content spam, keep you safe from hackers or detect and mitigate DDoS attacks. Smart image optimizations can reduce image file sizes by up to 35%, further improving speeds.

There's wide support for standards like IPv6, HTTP/2 and SPDY, clever page rules to help you manipulate traffic, and a REST API allows developers to take full control of what the service is doing. Also, Flan Scan, a lightweight network vulnerability scanner is thrown in the mix too.

Cloudflare's free plan allows you to see what the service can do, without making any commitments, and it is a permanent option rather than some time limited trial. It's very usable, with unlimited bandwidth and no annoying restrictions to try and force you to upgrade. Just realize that support is limited to self help and a community forum, and the bot protections are more basic.

Upgrading to the Pro plan costs a reasonable $20 (£16) a month, and adds the image optimization rules, extra configurability, and improved support in the form of trouble tickets. There is also an even more robust Business plan, and also an Enterprise plan that can be customized to your needs.

Whatever you choose, Cloudflare delivers great performance. As we write, the benchmarking site CDNPerf ranks Cloudflare in top five for worldwide HTTP request response times.

Read our Cloudflare review.

Fastly provides CDN tricks for some really big organizations, including the likes of Spotify, the New York Times, and Reddit, and the firm lives up to its name, delivering impressively fast performance levels. Going by the rough guideline of CDNPerf’s rankings, it’s the fourth fastest CDN for the UK, and worldwide the speeds put it in seventh place overall.

Perhaps Fastly’s strongest point, however, is just how configurable the service is. For example, there’s diverse support for different types of video caching, and tons of low-level controls for those who want to get stuck into the likes of manipulating HTTP headers to customize how content is served. You can also log in to multiple Fastly customer accounts with a single set of credentials for ease of use.

Of course, some know-how is required to set up everything, and novices to the CDN world will doubtless be confused by all the options on offer. But for those who need a higher  level of flexibility and configurability, it’s priceless to have.

Speaking of the price, Fastly operates a pay-as-you-go model with a minimum charge of $50 (£37) per month. In addition, while there is no free tier, you can give it a try, and test up to $50 of traffic for free.

Read our full Fastly review.

KeyCDN is an easy-to-use budget CDN that is an attractive choice for first-time users.

Getting started couldn't be much simpler. Sign up with your email address and you get an immediate 25GB to play with, no payment details required. A well-designed web dashboard enables creating your first zone with the minimum of clicks, and there are guides to help you integrate the service with WordPress and other apps.

In addition, KeyCDN fully supports IPv6.

More experienced users will appreciate options like Origin Shield – this allows you to specify a KeyCDN server to be the source for updates rather than the origin, reducing your server load. You're able to manipulate headers, cache or strip cookies, or set up a custom robots.txt.

Once the service is running, a capable set of reporting tools enable watching CDN performance in near real-time. Some additional features are available as well, like Block Referrer that blacklists the domains that are hotlinking content or Image Processing, which is great for image optimization.

A standout feature of KeyCDN is certainly its low prices. Bandwidth charges start at $0.04 (£0.032) per GB- less than half the price you'll pay with some of the high-end competition. The minimum usage is a downright cheap $4 (£3.2) per month with a minimum payment of $49 (£38). The company doesn't even try to cash in on the extras, for example offering shared SSL and custom Let's encrypt SSL certificates for free.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these low prices don't get you leading-edge performance, but there's still plenty of power here at a good value for your money.

Read our full KeyCDN review.

Stackpath, a CDN provider, focuses mainly on the West, with 14 points of presence (PoPs) in North America, and nine in Europe. Altogether, Stackpath has more than 50 PoPs all over the world in more than 43 locations including South America. It gets used by PBS and Valve among others.

StackPath is user-friendly, complete with a straightforward web console to manage your settings, and if you do get stuck, there’s extremely efficient technical support available via either live chat or phone.

Performance seems good in the US and UK, and indeed Europe, but further afield you may see things tail off a bit, which follows given StackPath’s aforementioned focus on Western nations.

Another strength here comes on the security front, with this CDN giving users free shared SSL (or the option to use your own SSL certificate, if you prefer). There’s also anti-DDoS technology, a capable Web Application Firewall, and EdgeRules, a powerful tool that lets you customize the behavior of StackPath's CDN at different phases of the CDN request.

All in all, this is a tempting offering with a baseline plan that charges $27.50 (£22) for up to 1TB of bandwidth per month. There is only some basic pricing on their site, and you'll need to contact the sales for more info.

Read our full StackPath review.

One of the oldest and most popular providers, Akamai offers a great CDN service and according to the company they serve up to 30% of all internet traffic. No wonder they can count among its users Best Buy, Honda and the Washington Post. Being one of the oldest providers their server coverage is impressive with around 275,000 servers in over 135 countries. Akamai also provides great 24/7 customer support which is to be expected from someone this long in the business.

Setting up might be a bit problematic for newbies though. This doesn’t mean newbies can't do it or that they would have much trouble, it’s just that the whole service is more geared for advanced users, generally speaking.

Akamai has a good number of features and the performance is quite impressive, among the best in fact. For instance, at the time of writing, the benchmarking site CDNPerf ranks Akamai among the eleventh fastest services worldwide.

Pricing is a bit tricky, as there is no definitive information to be found on their website, so this means you’ll have to contact them directly to get the exact quota. Thankfully, they are easy to contact and you can do it by live chat, email or phone, and the website indicates that they offer free trials.

Read our full Akamai review.

Amazon CloudFront is the CDN facet of AWS (Amazon Web Services), so it’s certainly part of a heavyweight operation, which includes 450+ POP’s for global coverage.And indeed CloudFront offers a raft of advanced features as you might expect, and you can customize all manner of things such as enabling automatic GZip compression for better speeds.

Another strength here is the in-depth analytics on tap, showing you details of your visitors’ device type, OS and so forth. There’s also the handy ability to set up alerts, meaning you can be warned when data transfer usage goes above a certain level.

The downside to all the options on offer is that relative novices to the CDN world may find CloudFront’s control panel a little intimidating, at least initially.

The other slight sticking points are that calculating pricing can be a rather tricky matter, and if you aren’t an experienced user familiar with CDN basics, tech support isn’t free – if you need help, you’ll have to fork out for it. Prices vary depending on region, but the good news is there’s a free tier, which gives you a generous 1 TB of data per month, with all features available.

Performance levels are fairly average, too, but there’s no denying the power and configurability that Amazon offers to the slightly more tech-savvy user.

Read our full Amazon CloudFront review.

As you’re doubtless aware, Microsoft Azure is a big old stack of integrated cloud tools for building and managing applications and services, with a wide range of coverage including a CDN offering, which is what we’re focusing on here, naturally. Note that this doesn’t use Microsoft’s own edge servers, but rather three plans that use other CDN networks: Standard Akamai, Standard Verizon, and Premium Verizon.

We fully discuss these various plans in our review of Microsoft’s CDN service, linked below, but suffice it to say that in terms of pricing – which can be somewhat confusing to work out – this isn’t the cheapest offering around. Still, those who want integration with other Microsoft technologies and services may well find the price worth paying.  You can create a free account and get started with a $200 credit, and over 55 free services, with a Pay-as-you-go model for any usage above the minimal amount included.

You get a web dashboard that is absolutely crammed with features, although as ever, this means it’s not particularly easy to use for beginners (and the setup process is pretty involved, too). Performance levels are good, and CDNPerf usually ranks it high. This has to be a tempting prospect if you’re using other Azure services, or if you’re a developer who will appreciate the likes of .NET or PowerShell management features.

Read our full Microsoft Azure CDN review.

CDN77 is a big-name player in the content delivery game, with some heavyweight clients signed up including Udemy, and the European Space Agency. It has an expansive CDN network with over 35 data centers across the globe, with many of those in Europe and the US, but there are also locations in South America, Asia and one in Australia, which form the backbone of a 120 Tbps network.

The web console interface is very streamlined and keeps any jargon to a minimum, making it suitably user-friendly for novices to the CDN world. The flipside of this is that there aren’t a huge amount of options, although you can do some tweaking of various settings.

In terms of performance, CDN77 is solid enough, and it ranks at number ten currently worldwide, quite respectable but not the fastest CDN network we found when reviewing these various services.

You get a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate, and CDN77 is pretty good value for money overall in terms of its per-GB pricing, although it’s not the cheapest outfit we’ve highlighted here. Pricing starts at $0.033 per GB of data for US and European locations which works out to a lowest tier plan of 6 TB for $199 monthly, with Asia and Latin America being more expensive. If you want to test the waters, there’s a 14-day risk-free trial which includes 1 TB of traffic, and you don’t need to supply any payment details for this.

Read our full CDN77 review.

If you need a powerful CDN, look no further than Leaseweb, an enterprise-level operation which is still suitable for regular business users – sort of.

Regardless if you want a multi-CDN or a private CDN, you'll need to contact Leaseweb for exact pricing, although don't expect it to be cheap. The good news is that even with a ‘basic’ subscription, you get all the same security and CDN features as the heavyweight enterprise plans.

That includes a smartly designed console for overseeing your CDN needs, complete with an extensive raft of potential settings and tweaks, featuring many options you don’t get with your average service (like the ability to set the cache-control header, or determine how long to cache 404 responses).

There’s also an in-depth statistics section which displays graphs and charts showing many interesting stats, such as visitor and traffic breakdowns, cache performance and the top file types which are seeing action. We also like the multiple contact options that include phone, and live chat.

The one somewhat bleak spot is Leaseweb’s performance, which is hard to know as it did not make CDNPerf’s current list for either worldwide of the United States. Users who want a powerful range of features in their CDN could give the 30-day trial a go to find out.

Read our full Leaseweb review.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of Points of Presence (PoP) designed to provide faster and reliable content delivery to users. Whether we know it or not, every one of us interacts with CDNs daily; when reading articles on news sites, shopping online, watching Netflix, or scrolling through social media feeds. CDN is the helper behind your seamless experience. It helps minimize loading time, costs, delivery latency, and operational complexity by physically reducing the distance between content providers and users worldwide.

How does CDN work?

For example, when a user in the US wants to load a website hosted in China, the user will need to send a request to the origin in China, and then the origin will send content from China to the U.S. However, it takes a longer time to load the content and might hamper the user experience. This is when CDN comes in. CDN keeps a copy of content at its own PoPs around the world. Based on users’ location, CDN serves the content to users from nearby PoPs whenever possible.

What are the benefits of using CDN?

1. Faster load time: Instead of sending requests to the origin and waiting for it to respond, the user will receive content from the CDN PoP nearby to reduce the latency.

2. Higher scalability: CDN can serve 40-200 Tbps at the peak of the traffic. It can provide an always-on experience globally, even under unpredictable situations such as malicious attacks or origin failure.

3. Lower bandwidth costs: Through caching and request optimizations, CDN helps content providers significantly reduce delivery costs since most traffic no longer egress from the origin.

4. Better security: CDN acts as a proxy in front of the origin server, which adds an extra layer to security by hiding the origin's real IP.

Why is CDN essential in this pandemic?

Because of COVID-19, most people are on digital platforms more frequently for working, attending online classes, watching live streaming, gaming, etc. Due to the enormous traffic, the entire digital pipeline is becoming more sensitive to latency and security.

CDN can help deliver content in a fast, secured, and seamless way ensuring a consistent and optimized user experience worldwide.

To find the best CDN providers, we tested them across multiple aspects. We first looked at how easy it was to set up the service and how long the process would take.

We considered the CDN's performance, network size, and geographic distribution to understand how fast the service was across different regions. We analyzed the various tools the services offered to improve website performance and speed.

• StackPath.
• Sucuri.
• Cloudflare.
• KeyCDN.
• Rackspace.
• Google Cloud CDN.
• CacheFly.
• Amazon CloudFront.