CDN is an acronym for “content delivery network”. Just as the name suggests, it is used to deliver the content of your website to your visitors with the fastest speed and the highest security.
Generally, if your readers want to view your web pages, their access requests will be sent to your web server.
Once the server receives the requests, it will send all the desired information back to the requesting machine (E.G. you readers’ computers), including HTML, images, multimedia files and JavaScript files.
However, the physical distance will affect the page loading and file downloading speed to the largest extent, after all, your content needs to travel a long time to be viewed by your readers if their geographical locations are far from your web server. In this circumstance, you need a CDN to speed up your website.
If you have no time to do the required research to choose a right CDN provider by yourself, then simply check out this list of top 5 ranking CDN providers, which have been carefully selected by our editor based on tests we have run on our own portfolio of sites.
About CDN Providers
All of the CDN providers have a network of servers in strategic locations around the world and copy your website content on each of these servers. Therefore, when people visit your site, they will be delivered your content from a nearby server, increasing the speed dramatically.
Now you know that a CDN is useful to grow your website you may be asking the question: which is the best CDN provider?
After all, there are so many options on the web with different features, prices, and guarantees. But don’t worry. We have given you a list of important criteria you need to consider when choosing a CDN.
- The CDN you choose needs to have an international reach, placing the servers at the most strategic locations.
- It should be able to provide you with the solid statistics showing how and when your visitors access your content.
- If your website contains private and sensitive information, then you need to make sure that the CDN offers encoding for secure content transferring.
- If your website always has a large number of readers trying to view your content at the same time, or if your site is a media-rich one, then you’d better choose a CDN that can supply enough bandwidth for your needs.
- Make sure the CDN supports the most advanced technology as the delivery methods, such as HTTP progressive downloads, Flash streaming, Windows Media streaming, and Quicktime or Real Media streaming, etc.
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1. Max CDN – Now StackPath
Website: https://www.stackpath.com/maxcdn/
Max CDN aims at improving the performance of a website, speeding up the page loading speed, reducing bandwidth usage, and increasing SEO rankings.
It has already been trusted by more than 13,000 businesses including WP Engine, Mobify, TNW, and DISQUS.
To offer the fastest speeds possible, Max CDN build a smarter network than many other CDN providers, with strategically selected data centers offering optimal speeds and lowest latency. Besides, in order to save on DNS lookups, this company utilizes Anycast DNS.
Some Core Features
- The CDN service integrates SSL, purges and provisions web content and generates reports in real-time.
- The Analytics system can figure out what, why, who and how your content performs with the real-time reporting and logs.
- The service will create secure tokens and also enable the two-step authentication to better safeguard your web content.
- There are the exact rules available to control how your web content behaves on their cutting-edge servers.
2. Cloudflare CDN
Website: https://www.cloudflare.com/
Cloudflare offers highly reliable CDN service with comprehensive global coverage. It has 23 points of presence across Europe, Asia, North America and Australia, reducing hops and lowering latency to the largest extent.
Its developing team builds their hardware from the ground up, choose the hardware components down to the chip level, run their own networks, and make the decision of choosing most strategic server locations to ensure the fastest network connections.
Cloudflare also utilizes an exclusive technology known as Anycast, which routes the accessing requests to the nearest data center automatically.
Why Use Cloudflare CDN
- Trusted by DigitalOcean, Mapbox, Zendesk, OkCupid, Discord, Quizlet and more.
- This CDN solution can improve the performance of your site dramatically. This is achieved by their web optimization features and global CDN.
- Cloudflare CDN views security greatly. Their DDoS protection, WAF and SSL all defend your site from any type of online threat.
- Cloudflare has more than 35% market share by running the fastest, largest and most reliable DNS service.
- The Cloudflare CDN network can identify the bot and visitor behavior that is not accessible to the analytics technologies.
3. Akamai
Website: https://www.akamai.com/
Akamai is the leading CDN provider, which helps webmasters maintain a fast webpage loading by distributing content from locations close to the readers.
It delivers excellent website performance for highly interactive content, including HTML, CSS, audio, graphics, animation, and video by transparently mirroring content.
Besides, it delivers secure online data transfer through SSL-content protection, thus reducing the risk of load-based online attacks.
At present, it is responsible for serving between 15% – 20% of all web traffic and used by some popular websites like MTV Networks, MySpace, and the Scripps News Networks.
Why Use Akamai
- Akamai is used and trusted by 30 of the top entertainment and media companies, 20 of the top global e-commerce sites, 18 of the largest asset managers and 12 of the top insurers and 96 of the top US retailers.
- Akamai provides uncompromising security for the risk-free digital experience. All the latest threats can be detected and avoided, such as fishing, DDoS, malware and data exfiltration.
- The service is achieved by over 200000 servers among more than 130 countries. This means you can get an uninterrupted experience at any time and anywhere.
- Akamai team has more than 19 years of experience, coming with a team of over 1600 experts. In this case, the CDN service never sleeps during your digital life.
4. Amazon CloudFront
Website: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
The Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with all the Amazon Web Services available, offering a comprehensive CDN service that enables customers to deliver content to their visitors quickly and safely, regardless of the physical distance and data limits.
It will automatically route requests to the servers nearest to site visitors, thus ensure the highest levels of security and speed. Besides, the interface of CloudFront is incredibly simple and easy to use, with which customers can customers store files on servers, create a register of these servers, and use the distribution’s domain name in all web sites effortlessly.
5. CDNetworks
Website: https://www.cdnetworks.com/
CDNetworks offers a secure, reliable, scalable and high performing content delivery network service, leveraging the power of Global Cloud Acceleration technology.
It is a multinational CDN with expertise and infrastructure in China, Russia and many other emerging markets. As estimated, it has accelerated more than 17,500 global websites and cloud services over 140 points of presence (PoPs).
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