Introduction

A CDN or content delivery network accelerates the website by caching its content in servers globally. Whether your visitors come from Asia, America, Africa, Europe, UK, etc., the content will be served automatically from the closest location for the fastest possible loading speeds. The most important thing is to make sure that you choose the best content delivery network for your website.

This phrase may appear to be intimidating for those people who are new to technology. The pricing of content distribution networks can be high but this should not put you off. CDNs are not just designed for large corporations. It can take you less than five minutes to set up some of the simplest services. with wise planning, this won’t even cost you anything.

Whether you have an extensive website for a big business or a small blog, you will not fail to get the best content delivery network for your needs. Some of these tools come for free but you can always upgrade to get access to more features. You need to consider all these details before you sign up for any contract. First, let us understand what is a content delivery network is before we move forward with this guide

What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?

This is one of the questions that will not fail to cross your mind when you hear about content delivery networks for the first time. However, it is not a hard phrase to understand even if you are not an IT Guru. A content delivery network or CDN is a group of servers that are geographically distributed and work hand in hand to offer high-speed internet content delivery. Therefore, it is something that everyone who owns a website requires for online success.

A content delivery network supports the quick transfer of assets that are required to load internet content such as videos, images, stylesheets, JavaScript files, and HTML pages among others. The popularity of CDN services has continued to increase and most of the web traffic today is served via CDNs. This includes traffic from leading websites such as Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook.

With a CDN that is configured properly, you will also protect your site against common malicious attacks like the DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. It tells you why you need to go for the best content delivery network all the time.

You could be wondering whether CDN is the same as a web host. CDN doesn’t host content and cannot replace the need for correct hosting. However, it helps in caching content at the network edge hence improving the performance of your website. Most websites are struggling with traditional hosting services to meet their performance needs. That is why most of them are opting for content delivery networks.

Using cache to reduce the hosting bandwidth improves security and prevents service interruptions. CDN is a popular choice for relieving some of the main pain points that traditional web hosting brings along. With this, you now have a clear CDN meaning.

The Criteria We Used to Select the Best Content Delivery Network

We test content delivery networks for different fields to establish the quality of services that they offer. We look at several things to help us narrow down to the best content delivery network. The main points that we analyze include;

Performance: We establish the quality of service that the content delivery network offers to customers. You need a tool that is highly efficient in supporting a quick transfer of assets that load internet content. The tools that we recommend are the best when it comes to performance. When you use them, you can be sure of having one of the fastest loading websites.

Features: The other determinant of the best content delivery network are the features that come with it. The features will determine how you can use the content delivery network. We look for a tool whose functionalities support the needs of a website owner. There is no need to choose a tool that has several limitations when it comes to the features. The reason is that such a tool will not give you the service that you need most.

Ease of Use: Some content distribution networks are so hard to use especially if you are a beginner. That is why we recommend the tools that you can easily tell how they work. The best content delivery network will always have a user-friendly network. However, we make sure that we recommend a tool that will not compromise on the quality of services.

Support: When using a content delivery network, there may come a time when you may have an issue with the service itself. It is good to choose a company that offers excellent technical support to its customers. That is why we look for the most reliable brands out there. In case you have an issue with the CDN, you can be sure that the companies that we recommend will serve you perfectly.

Pricing: The last criteria that we use in choosing the best content delivery network is pricing. To make the right choice, we compare the cost of the tool to the quality of service that you get. The most important thing is to help you to get the value for your money.

5 Best Content Delivery Network Service Provider

  • Company
  • Main Features
  • Price
  • Rating
  • More
1
  • Always online
  • Great reliability
  • Increased traffic
  • No configuration needed
  • Cloudflare load balancing
  • From
  • $0/Free
  • 100%
  • score
2
  • Cost-Effective
  • Best Billing Plans
  • AWS billing report
  • Vast Global Presence
  • Easy content delivery
  • From
  • $0.020/mo
  • 100%
  • score
3
  • Raise Conversions
  • Increased Security
  • Hotlink Protection
  • HTTP Live Streaming
  • Improve Performance
  • From
  • $0.04/GB
  • 100%
  • score
4
  • Real-Time Analytics
  • HTTP/2 Server Push
  • Web Socket Support
  • Edge Rules™ Included
  • Segmented Downloads
  • From
  • $20/month
  • 100%
  • score
5
  • Akamai CLI
  • Higher speeds
  • Cloud services
  • Better Security
  • Flexible Scaling
  • From
  • $Custom Pricing
  • 100%
  • score

Summary

Why You Choose Content Delivery Networks for Your Business

The worldwide web is an endless virtual landscape that boasts of more than 2.5 billion users. The internet gives business owners an exclusive opportunity of reaching out to their customers globally. The challenge remains how to give your users an excellent user experience through a great web performance. There is always a challenge with the dormancy, an increase in security threats, and poor connection. CDN providers offer some of the best solutions to these issues.

Content delivery, indeed, comes in handy at this point. It is the number one tool when it comes to the provision of secure and optimal web performance regardless of where your end-users are located. The reasons that content delivery networks offer to customers will make you choose them. These benefits vary depending on internet property. Some of them include;

Huge Boost on the Response Times and Reliability of Your Brand

With a high performing website, your business will record growing sales and high conversion rates. However, speed issues and latency have a tendency of crippling online businesses and coursing damages. Even a few seconds of added loading times can mean a lot when it comes to the bounce rate and successful conversion. A reputable content delivery network will guarantee you an optimal loading speed. It also makes sure that your online transactions are processed seamlessly. Therefore, if you are wondering which of the following is an advantage of a content delivery network? Boosting your reliability and response times is one of them.

1. Global Outreach

The other beauty about a CDN is the fact that it gives your brand a global outreach. More than 30% of the world population is online. What this implies is that the use of the internet globally has been increasing globally over the past 15 years. Content delivery networks use cloud acceleration with the local PoPs to provide solutions. This kind of global reach eliminates any form of latency that interfered with the long-distance online transactions and slows down the loading times. Therefore, if you want your business to reach all the corners of the world, all you need to do is start using the best content delivery network. All the people who visit your website will have a great user experience.

2. Savings

The other benefit of a content delivery network to your business is the fact that it will help you to save a lot of money. Your business will report noticeable savings when you hire a CDN. There is no need to invest in separate service providers and infrastructure all across the globe. With a global CDN, there is no need to pay for expensive foreign hosting and this will save your business a lot of cash. The beauty of a global CDN is the fact that it gives you one platform for handling all your separate operations. It works across multiple regions at a reasonable cost. Companies that work with a tight budget also find CDNs to be an optimal choice. For businesses that are relatively small, you can even begin with free plans like Cloudflare. You can always upgrade to the premium plans and get more features as your business continues to grow. It is because of this that CDNs can help you to save a lot of money.

3. Availability 24/7

With CDNs, there is a distribution of assets across so many geographical regions. CDNs come with automatic server sensing availability mechanisms that have an instant user redirection. Because of this, the CDN websites do experience availability of 100%. You will still get access to this service even during network problems, hardware issues, and massive power outages. You will encounter major issues as long as you choose the best content delivery network. It is a benefit that any business out there will really want to get from a content distribution network.

4. Decreased Server Loading

One thing you need to understand about content delivery networks is that they have a strategic placement. As a result, it can reduce the server loading on private and public peers and backbones, interconnects, decrease delivery costs, and free up the overall capacity. It essentially spreads out your web content across different servers. Therefore, it does not off-load them on a single large server.

5. 24/7 Customer Support

The best CDN providers are renowned for the outstanding customer support that they provide. There is always a standby customer service team all the time waiting for any support requests. In case something goes wrong, you will have a backup team that is waiting to help you fix any performance-related issues. It is a smart business decision to have a support team on quick dial. Remember you aren’t paying for a cloud service but the large set of services that will help your business to grow globally. Therefore, it is good to have somewhere to learn whenever such issues come your way.

6. Increasing Concurrent Users

When CDN providers place their servers strategically, it leads to a high network backbone capacity. This results in a massive increase in the number of users who access the network at any given time. For instance, in a place that has a network backbone of 100 GB/s with a capacity of 2 tb/s, there will be a delivery of 100 GB/s. However, when using a CDN, there will be 10 available servers at very strategic locations. What this means is that the servers will provide a total capacity of 10 X 100 GB/s. Therefore, it is a good way to increase the capacity of users.

7. DDoS Protection

Apart from the massive economic losses, DDoS attacks also tend to have adverse effects on the image and reputation of the victimized organization or company. Whenever a customer inputs his credit card number in order to make a payment online, he is putting all the trust in your business. It can be so bad if you let the customers down at this point.

DDoS attacks have been on the rise and IT experts are now coming up with new ways to guarantee internet security. All these efforts have been helping to increase the growth in content delivery platforms. The reason is that cloud security brings in an additional layer of security.

The way cloud solutions are designed is such that they stop attacks before it can get onto your data centers. Therefore, you should not be concerned with how DDoS attacks will affect your data center. It is the best way to keep your business website sound and safe. Therefore, it is not a waste of your resources to make use of the best content delivery network. DDoS service providers prioritize the issue of security for all the files that are stored on their servers.

Therefore, a content distribution network will go a long way in increasing the security of your website. The CDN provides the desired mitigation and makes improvements to the security certificates among other optimizations.

8. Analytics

Apart from delivering content at a very fast speed, content delivery networks also provide priceless analytical information to discover trends that can result in advertisement sales and reveal the strengths and weaknesses of any online business. Content delivery networks have the capacity of delivering real-time load statistics, display active regions, optimize capacity per customer, indicate popular assets, and report viewing details for their clients.

These are extremely important details because the user logs are always deactivated after adding the server source to the CDN. The Info analysis displays everything that a developer requires to know in order to optimize the website further. In-depth reporting will ultimately increase the performance of your website. This will result in a high user experience and further reflect on the conversion rates and the sales volume. As you know, analytics are extremely important to the performance of your business. The best content delivery network will always have this functionality among its features. It is good to confirm whether the platform that you want to choose has this feature.

9. Improve Web Loading Times

When you distribute content close to your visitors by using the closest CDN server, visitors will definitely experience fast page loading times. It is one of the optimization techniques that you can rely upon as a company. It is good to note that visitors have an inclination of clicking away from slow-loading websites. CDNs tend to increase the amount of time that visitors spend on your website and also reduce the bounce rates. What this means is that a fast loading website will motivate visitors to stick on your website for a longer period.

10. Reducing the Cost of Bandwidth

The primary expenditure for website hosting is the cost of bandwidth consumption. Through various optimization techniques like caching, CDNs reduce the volume of data the origin server should provide. This, in turn, will go a long way in reducing your cost of hosting as a website owner. Who will not be happy to get such a benefit from his content delivery network?

Reduce Redundancy and Increase Content Availability

Hardware failures and huge amounts of traffic will interrupt the normal functioning of your website. Great thanks to the distributive nature of CDN as it can withstand hardware failures and handle more traffic better than most origin servers. If you want to increase the availability of your online content, just choose the best content delivery network and you will be good to go. It is one of the best ways to increase the element of content available for your servers.

FAQs

There are so many benefits that come with a content delivery network. However, the main one is that a CDN allows content providers to deliver fast and high-quality web experiences to all the end-users. It does not matter the network, device, browser, or location that you are connecting from. With the best content delivery network, webpages will render faster, there is a reduction in video buffering time, the users will stay more engaged, and you will get more business if you are a content provider. 
There are so many CDN platforms in the market and that is why we chose to look at the best content delivery networks. One example of a content distribution network is Akamai. You can choose it if you want a fast-loading website.
To make good use of a CN, it is important to learn how it works. The CDN minimizes the distance between your server and visitors by storing a cached version of your content in several geographical locations i.e. points of presence (PoPs). Every PoP has several caching servers that deliver content to visitors within that proximity. What this means is that the CDN puts your web content in several places at one hence giving your users superior coverage. For instance, if someone in Florida accesses your Indian-based website, he will do so through a local USA PoP. It is much quicker than when the requests and responses of your visitors have to travel all the way to New Delhi. This is how CDN works in a nutshell. To get a deeper understanding of the same, you need to read the entire guide on CDN.
The initials CDN stand for the phrase ‘content delivery network.’ It refers to a largely-distributed server platform that reduces delays in the loading of web page content. What CDNs do is to reduce the geographical distance between the user and the server. It allows website visitors all over the world to access high-quality content with no slow loading times.
Yes, you can get a free CDN, a perfect example being Cloudflare. It is a popular free CDN that you can use for your WordPress website. Cloudflare remains to be the best content delivery network for WordPress. With the use of Cloudflare, the traffic on your website can be routed via its global network that is adequately powered by 34 data centers all over the world. However, to get access to many features, you will need to access the premium plan.
Publicly available content and caching static in a CDN has very low risks. For instance, public fonts, videos, and images are usually cached on CDNs safely. However, a public CDN is not the best choice if you have major security concerns.
Cloudflare has a free plan that provides basic protection from shared SSL certificates and DDoS. This plan is quite adequate for small business sites. However, for professional websites, Cloudflare recommends its entry-level paid plan. There are three payment plans which include Pro, Business, and Enterprise. The features for each of them vary depending on the cost.
There are three CDNs that work best for WordPress websites. Top among them all is CloudFlare that has a free CDN and security service with a large global network. The other top choices are Optimole and the Jetpack Site accelerator.
There are 5 steps in creating your own CDN server. First, decide on whether you will use Cloud or On-Premise solutions. From here you need to get the best ISP and routing for your needs. The third step is to originate servers and PoPs. Fourth is installing varnish DIY and CDN software. The final step is just configuring the varnish and you will be good to go.
In most instances, the use of popular CDNs for the big libraries implies that the users have downloaded the resource beforehand from the site of another person. What this means is that the file will be cached in their browser locally. The use of CDN for most of the static files is better for any user.

Conclusion

From the discussion in this article, you understand what a CDN is. You need to look at several factors when choosing the best content delivery network. The top ones include the features, performance, ease of use, support, and pricing of the specific tool. These are the factors that we consider when choosing the best content delivery network. With the right choice, you will be able to increase the speed and availability of your website.

There are so many CDNs in the market that you can choose from. Some of the best products include Cloudflare, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, KeyCDN, and Stackpath. You can choose any of these products depending on your needs. The most important thing is to choose a product that will add great value to the performance of your business. This can never be the case unless you are using the best content delivery network in the market.

Mashum Mollah

Mashum Mollah has been there in the blogging industry for over a decade. He has always believed that blogging holds the most potential in the digital marketing industry. With years of research, he has created some of his best blogging practices, which have helped him establish himself in the industry as a Blogging Engineer. Now he is on a mission to help others and spread the concept of Blogging Engineer.