Despite the fact that websites are not the main means of dissemination in most business areas, they are still positioned as an essential engine for the user to choose to stay with a specific brand. Those who offer products or services must do everything possible to satisfy the customer’s needs in a timely manner.
One of the allies is providing access to your website much faster, without implying too high an investment of money. Today we are going to show you what a CDN is, how it works, and what are the best CDNs that you can hire.
What is a CDN?
Its initials correspond to Content Delivery Network. A CDN is a set of servers interconnected through the Internet, the main function of which is to speed up the loading of websites for users. They do this by getting the cache of virtually any website. On the other hand, that cache is stored on its servers that can be located anywhere in the world.
Do you know what is best of all? It does not matter if you have visitors who are located on the other side of the continent. Each and every one of them will be able to enjoy a high loading speed of your website. CDNs, together with Load Balancers , are two tools to have a website with an excellent user experience. However, you may not be very clear on how to implement it initially. Therefore, there are several providers that greatly facilitate the task of doing it, we can even find quite well-known providers that offer free plans.
It doesn’t matter if you have a small, medium or large website, everyone can access a CDN solution. You are likely to definitely save on costs if you feel that the free plan meets your needs. Or, you can opt for the wide variety of premium plans with variable costs according to need. For example, in the ADSLZone Group we use the Transparent CDN CDN, which is a Spanish company.
Scheme of operation of a CDN
Once you have chosen the CDN provider of your choice, a large part of the work is done by that provider:
- The content delivery network makes copies of web pages and transports them to a network of servers that are scattered in different locations. This transport process is called ” caching ” in English, it means creating a copy.
- If a user requests access to a web page, and it is part of this CDN network, the access request is automatically redirected by the CDN itself to a member server. The member is chosen based on the user’s geographical proximity, that is, if our website is hosted in Spain, and we have a CDN server in the US, if they connect from that country, the request will go to that nearby US server, and not to the origin (Spain).
- After having located the server, this server delivers the copy of the original content of the web page. That is, the cache of the requested page.
An important point is that the CDNs constantly communicate with the different web servers of the sites, to constantly generate the cache of the content that has not yet been detected. This process is completely transparent to the user.
There is a tool called CDN Finder , from the CDN Planet company, that will let us know if a certain website uses a CDN. It is a website that does not require you to register if you want to consult information about CDN. Simply enter the URL and in a few moments you will get the desired information:
To be even faster, we can simply modify the URL:
https://www.cdnplanet.com/tools/cdnfinder/#site:https://www.ejemplo.com
Where it says www.ejemplo.com you can indicate the website you prefer, always indicating if it is http or https . Then you give Enter and you will directly get the CDN Finder page with the results.
The best CDNs you can start testing right now
Cloudflare
It is one of the most popular CDNs when it comes to web services. It is used by super popular services like Zendesk, Digital Ocean, the Udacity course portal and the popular Discord. It is characterized by wide adoption due to the fact that it is quite easy to use, despite not having much technical knowledge.
Anyone who chooses Cloudflare as a CDN provider will be able to enjoy multiple features that will benefit their website. It is not necessary to edit some type of code, it simply indicates the names of DNS servers ( nameservers ) and the service starts operating as soon as possible. Start generating a copy (cache) of the pages that make up your website. And as we already know, all that cache is directed to the servers that are part of the CDN that are located in various locations.
It has additional functionalities such as web content filtering. Which can block bots, unwanted content (spam) and most importantly, protect you from cyber attacks. We know that DDoS attacks are largely carried out to leave websites of all kinds, especially powerful ones, unworked. On the other hand, if your website uses images frequently, it optimizes them automatically up to 35% using an intelligent optimization system.
Cloudflare supports modern services like IPv6, HTTP / 2 and SPDY. For your consideration, the latter is a protocol that is responsible for optimizing the fluidity of communication between client and server, which greatly contributes to the loading speed of websites. In addition, to further increase the security of the site, it has a vulnerability scanner called Flan Scan .
This service is, without a doubt, a benchmark throughout the world, and also has very interesting additional services. Let’s see what plans you have available, and what each of these plans offers us.
Free Plan
As its name suggests, it is the free plan that Cloudfare offers, ideal for small websites, blogs for personal use. In this version it offers mitigation of unmeasured DDoS attacks, global CDN, shared SSL Certificate and 3 rules per page. It also offers an “I’m under attack” mode where all the defenses of the CDN will be activated to prevent them from knocking down the website, thus mitigating the attack.
Pro plan
Like the free plan it offers us the same as the free one, but adding a web application firewall (WAF), image optimization with Polish, mobile accelerations with Mirage, and 20 page rules. It costs $ 20 a month per domain.
Business plan
This plan adds everything from the previous plans (Pro and Free), but also adds the following features:
- Priority email support
- It allows choosing the “TLS Only” mode to protect all communications at all times.
- Uploading a custom SSL certificate
- Skip cache memory in cookies
- 50 page rules
- The WAF firewall allows you to configure it with 25 custom rules.
This plan is priced at $ 200 per month per domain. This plan is aimed at small businesses and e-commerce websites that need to have guarantees of security and operation.
Enterprise plan
In the Cloudflare Enterprise plan, in addition to all the above of the other plans, it adds operation and security of enterprise grade with uninterrupted assistance by phone, email and chat, they also guarantee 100% uptime, something that with the others plans does not happen.
It also has several custom SSL certificate uploads, access to records, priority in the CDN network, includes 100 page rules, access to China’s data centers, role-based account access. The price is personalized according to the needs of each company, but logically it will not be cheap.
However, all these features that we mention are included according to the plan you choose. You can enter the official portal where you can take a look at the list of available plans, including the free one.
Transparent CDN
Transparent CDN is a Spanish company, it could be said that they are the Spanish Cloudflare. This company offers us a series of very interesting features, such as, for example, that it has CDN servers spread throughout Spain, so that all websites always load as quickly as possible.
Transparent CDN has caching algorithms that allow web pages hosted on its CDNs to load up to 10 times faster. The entire ADSLZone Group is on the Transparent CDN. Of course, this CDN provides us with “Transparent Secure Layer”, basically it is the technology that mitigates DoS and DDoS attacks that different web pages could suffer.
The last option that we can highlight from this CDN, are its services that allow converting videos on demand VOD, or live videos in all formats so that they are distributed on all devices and platforms. This happens thanks to Transparent Transconding Services, Live Streaming Services and Transparent Storage. Transparent CDN does not charge you for requests, invalidations or registered domains, you can have as many as you want.
We recommend you access the official website of Transparent CDN plans , where you will find all the information on prices, technology used, and the contact form.
Akamai CDN
One of Cloudflare’s main competitors is Akamai, it is another of the companies that we must take into account when choosing a CDN service. The negative part of Akamai is that, to know its prices, we must speak directly with its commercial service, we will not find the prices on the official website.
Akamai’s CDN services rely on three software components to stand out from the competition:
- Aura Edge eXchange: It allows to offer online video content and commercial services, based on a SaaS solution, which allows to implement the services quickly and at the minimum initial cost and without complexity.
- Aura Control System: It is a set of unified tools that allow the interconnection of all the products and services that Akamai offers. Thanks to this, you can manage errors, configuration, account, performance and security problems.
- Akamai Federation: Serves so that its clients can join Akamai Intelligent Platform, this platform is the largest Cloud Computing network in the world, according to Akamai. Thanks to this, customers will be able to better distribute their content.
And this, broadly speaking, is what Akamai offers to differentiate itself from your competition as Cloudflare. We recommend you visit the official Akamai website where you will find all the information about its service.
Fastly
It is one of the most popular CDN providers in Europe, characterized by delivering websites at very high loading speed. The best thing about this platform is that it has many configuration options . For example, you can choose between different types of video cache generation, the latter is very useful if the website you manage has a high focus on streaming multimedia content. The need for immediacy on the part of users can be covered by solutions such as Fastly.
On the other hand, you can manipulate the HTTP headers , with the purpose of customizing the way the content of the website is being transmitted. Of course, if the need indicates so, you can choose this interesting facility. However, the fact that you have a wide range of configuration options can be a problem. Especially due to the fact that users who do not have much knowledge about website configuration, can get a bit overwhelmed. This CDN provider is clearly geared towards larger scale sites and of course, more experienced administrators.
It has a payment model called pay-as-you-go . Basically, this means that you pay what you use. The minimum you can pay per subscription is an approximate cost of € 37. Also, if you want to try a free plan you can test up to just € 37 of traffic. Do you need more details? You can access Fastly’s official website from here .
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon is known to have a strong presence in relation to web services. Its Amazon Web Services division offers one that provides CDN servers: Amazon CloudFront . It has functionalities of all kinds of range of use and difficulty, therefore, you can configure even details such as GZip compression so that your hosted website can load even faster.
One of the aspects that characterizes Amazon CloudFront is the great ability to provide analysis tools, which show you very interesting details regarding visiting users. For example, you can know about the devices they use to navigate your site, operating system and its version, among other advanced aspects. It is also possible to configure alerts that inform you if the data transfer exceeds the established level.
As with Fastly, the benefits offered by Amazon CloudFront are quite a few and the way they are configured can intimidate some people who do not have much experience. However, if you already have experience, it is one of the best options you could choose from, because Amazon has a high level of reputation, technology and support for practically all the products and services offered.
On the other hand, and as is characteristic of Jeff Bezos’ company, the way in which costs are calculated is not entirely familiar to most. However, if you really want to opt for Amazon services, the ideal is to go to the cost section and review their details . It even has a monthly cost calculator so that one can determine what approximately will pay per month, since there is no fixed cost, but uses the pay-as-you-go method. Do you want to create an account? Access this link and access this and other AWS services.
Swarmify
This solution provides a CDN that guarantees that the users of your website can have an excellent experience watching videos. It is characterized by being resilient. Even when certain failure situations and / or changes in network traffic occur. It has great ease of use, since it does not need editing any type of code or any task related to programming. So Swarmify is perfectly suited for those users who don’t have much technical knowledge but still look for a good CDN provider.
We know that videos are gaining more and more weight in all areas, be it in business, education and, why not, in the technological field. Through this video oriented CDN provider, you will make all the effort used to create the best of audiovisual materials to be ideally used by users.
It is known that YouTube is one of the streaming services that hosts a large number of videos, mainly due to its global reach. However, there are times when users don’t want to bother watching a video and have to go to the YouTube app or website. One of the functionalities of this tool allows that, only by means of the direct link, Swarmify obtains the video and converts it so that it can be directly reproducible from your own site, in addition to playing it faster.
If your website is mostly moved by videos, Swarmify is a good alternative. Although to have full access to the service you must pay for a monthly subscription, you have all the details at this link .
Microsoft Azure CDN
Microsoft‘s Azure is one of the largest cloud service providers we can name. One of them, of course, is the CDN provider . If you are already a “complete” user, so to speak, of Microsoft services like others of Azure, this is the alternative you were looking for. However, it has a couple of important considerations: the servers that are part of the CDN are not their own, but from specialized companies like Akamai. On the other hand, the cost is not so easy to determine for many people and can be somewhat expensive.
Here we share with you a direct link to get provision of Microsoft CDN services. One of the features that stands out is the fact that it has robust security, which means that all the content that is transmitted to the user through the CDNs that are under its control is completely secure. Thus, attacks such as DDoS will be prevented, which is one of the most affected by users and organizations around the world. On the other hand, Azure CDN allows you to take advantage of its analysis capacity to find out about the flow of information that users handle, in addition to keeping track of their respective needs and habits. The analysis that can be performed is quite detailed and is available in real time.
Stack Path CDN Edge Service
Based on what we’ve found, Stack Path is the best CDN provider that is geared for WordPress sites. One of the main characteristics is the fact that its servers have the equipment that makes them perform spectacularly. We are talking about SSD storage units and servers that are stored in equipped data centers around the world.
It works with caching plugins (cache generators) known as W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache . It is characterized by its simple installation and its commissioning in a few minutes. The control panel that helps setup is friendly even for users who don’t have much experience.
Some of the functions that you can access are: viewing reports, setting up locations, adding SSL certificates or using a shared SSL certificate. The latter ensures that all content that has gone through the caching process is delivered using protocols such as HTTPS. The plans range from approximately 9.06 Euros, and this includes only the provision of CDN. Then, there are already plans with a higher cost and a greater range of benefits. Access the official site through this link .
