Design your way

How do you pick one of the many CDN providers that are available? It isn’t easy and that’s for sure. Check out this article that provides CDN solutions and tips on choosing one.

CDN, meaning content delivery network, is the common name for proxy-servers and data centres distributed on different geographical locations, and used to make service highly accessible and functional for all end users.

Much of the content available on the Internet nowadays is distributed with via content delivery networks, including a variety of downloadable objects (software, documents, media), web objects (text, graphics, and scripts), applications (web portals, e-commerce services), on-demand and live streaming media, and, of course, social networks.

What is a CDN provider?

The CDN term brings under the same roof all types of content delivery, including software downloads, streaming, web/mobile loading acceleration, transparent caching, performance measuring services, load balancing, licensed CDN, multi CDN switching, cloud intelligence, and many more.

Certain CDN vendors also offer services beyond their industries, among which data security and WAN optimization.

Who should use CDN services?

Popular CDN providers target mostly online portals, brokers, retailers, banks, and similar businesses.

In fact, CDN servers make sense for every webmaster trying to enhance online performance nowadays, as the pricing plans are very flexible, and there are even free services to consider.

What matters the most when trying to make content visible is location.

The common problem is having all content located in a single place, as this also means lowering the quality of the experience of users located further from the server.

Let us give you an example: When a website has all of its content located on a New York server, it will take much longer for China users to load a page than it would for ones located in Philadelphia.

There is nothing strange about it – the law of physics takes its tool, and content simply takes time to arrive to the desired destination.

CDN architectures are usually very diverse, but there are few core components present in each of them:

Delivery Nodes – The reason why CDNs actually exist is to streamline data delivery for all consumers. This is why they usually contain caches that run in several delivery applications, and which are deployed as close to the customers as possible.
Storage Nodes – Caches ought to be supplied with data, and that’s why CDNs comes with storage nodes that tie caching, and offer protection for all origin servers. The nodes are deployed in a hierarchical manner, and are applicable both when pre-publishing content and acquiring on-demand content from the original server.
Origin Nodes – Origin Nodes are the main content sources which you can deploy either on the operator’s network (on the net), or within the owner’s infrastructure. In most cases, you will be provided with a large number of origins to make the content scalable and more resilient.
Control Nodes – Control nodes contain the main hosting, routing, and monitoring components of the CDN, and it is there where you can integrate your Network operations centres and BSS/OSS systems.

How do CDN providers work?

The nodes will be deployed on several different locations (commonly over different backbones), and will allow you to improve the loading time of your pages, and cat bandwidth costs in half.

They will also make your content globally available, depending on the CDN’s architecture and number/type of available servers. Certain CDNs come with a very large number of nodes and servers, as well as thousands of remote presence pints (PoPs).

What type of content can you distribute with a CDN? Let’s check:

Dynamic content: dynamic content refers to data generated by the web server, and created using common programming languages such as PHP, Java, or Ruby.
Static content: this term refers to content you won’t modify once it is put in place, and thus requires no generation work (CSS, JavaScript, imagery, and more.)
Streaming content: these are the audio and video files we play and control using our web browser.

The size of each content piece is different.

Therefore, it is very difficult to estimate for how long it would travel starting from the point of origin and moving to the end user.

This period if officially known as latency (the faster web content loads, the lower the latency will be), and it is measured in milliseconds.

The challenge of optimizing latency is becoming bigger every day, with more and more content being invoked from mobile devices. Here, the latency factor is even more important, and should be worked upon with an aggressive, and very advanced optimization strategy.

Google and Yahoo have prepared a number of useful studies that confirm latency being a leading success factors, as websites lose as much as 10% of their conversions for each additional second of loading times. This is why all leading websites use CDN services, and deliver content in a very optimal fashion.

Here are some well-reputed CDN providers you should consider:

CloudFlare

CloudFlare is an excellent alternative for those looking to accelerate and protect their sites. It is a part of a large productivity community, and owns a global network where it routes your web traffic. A distinctive advantage is that you have all particular pages optimized for fast loading and excellent performance, with all abusive crawlers, bots, and similar threats being kept out of the way.

CloudFare is not challenging to install or maintain, and also comes with an analytics suite to help you understand how your business is progressing. Its functionality is expandable, and you can always contact the vendor for interesting apps and additions.

BelugaCDN

BelugaCDN has been on the market for only two years, but it gained extreme popularity for offering pay-as-you-go services. Their POPs are distributed on 5 continents, and they posses one of the most robust IPv4+IPv6 networks.

Accela

Accela is a CDN provider currently powering millions of transactions of public providers and agencies worldwide. It is best known for helping governments establish a connection with citizens, and shorten a number of complex administrative procedures related to asset management, public health and safety, licensing, land management, and more.

The CDN is also one of the pioneer networks in the niche, with years of experience in powering civic excellence.

Akamai Technologies

Akamai Technologies is certainly a name that rings a bell, namely a popular and very adaptive CDN solution that meets the needs of any business. They will also cater to varying internet condition, and provide your customers with unparalleled performance, online experience, and security.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon CloudFront is another popular content delivery service, tightly integrated with the rest of Amazon’s productivity batch to ensure a seamless transition of content. It targets both business owners and developers, helping them distribute content at the best latency rates, and putting in place and admirable data transfer tempo with no long-term commitments.

Bit Gravity

BitGravity is one world’s largest and best known content delivery networks, and a tool fully optimized for HD live streaming and delivery of on-demand video content. It was founded 11 years ago, and has been broadening its capabilities day-by-day to become easily applicable in different organizations around the world.

Satisfied customers share that the network helps them serve top performing video content, organize reliable streaming events, and broadcast content 24/7 in high definition.

CacheFly

CacheFly is another CDN provider known to deliver ultra reliable and high performing content, and one that has been on the market for more than 10 years. It was this company that first introduced TCP Anycast (2002), and transformed it into a do-it-all CDN service.

At the moment, it operates in more than 80 countries, serving an average number of 2,000 customers that love its reliability and scalability.

Incapsula

Being one of the top application-aware CDNs on the market, Incapsula uses advanced networking, content optimization, and dynamic caching to boost the performance of your website. It also makes use of various advanced security techniques (monitoring notifications, for instance), and protects your content from DDos attacks, misbalances, and failovers.

Incapsula also accelerates outgoing traffic, and makes performance at least 50% faster consuming at the same 60% less bandwidth than the usual. You will devote only few minutes to install it, as you’re not supposed to change your hosting provider in order to use it. There are no long-term commitments, and you can turn off the CDN any time you want.

Edgecast

Edgecast is touted as a really global CDN built to optimize, secure, and accelerate website performance. Throughout the years, it proved in many occasions that it is capable to handle sudden traffic spikes, and accelerate the performance of popular web tools which often face security threats.

It will serve both for static and dynamic content coming from optimal locations, and deliver it faster than you could possibly expect. The tool also incorporates a smart analytics suite, which keeps you updated on the server’s performance, collects user demographics data, and measures bandwidth utilization.

Therefore, Edgecast and its Flash, HTTP, and Silverlight streaming capabilities are your safest bet for delivering rich media content on demand.

CDN77

CDN77.com focuses on customers, providing them with the flexibility and transparency they need without long-term financial commitments. It is present at 30 different locations worldwide, and specializes in consistent, quick, authorized, and latest technology delivery for all devices. There is a free 14-days trial for readers interested to test their services.

QUANTIL

QUANTIL was established in 2012, and focuses on live stream delivery ever since. It supports L-HLS, RTMP, HTTP FLV, and HTTP TS. Using it, you will also benefit from a fully-featured IPv4 and IPv6 network (a joint POPs network) that functions in over 34 countries worldwide (mainland China included).

Limelight

Limelight (NASDAQ: LLNW) has a 15-years tradition of notable market performance. The huge, super-capable CDN network also has many POPs distributed on different continents, and distributes live and on-demand content and web acceleration services.

StackPath

StackPath, on the other hand, was established only in 2016, built on the basis of MaxCDN’s platform. Experts estimated as a very promising, high-performance global provider that prides itself with top notch security (an integrated app firewall). At the same, StackPath streamlines delivery and keeps things simple, affordable, and very transparent.

They belong to the category of providers whose support is available 24/7/365, and they also make sure that each user receives fully documented API info.

Fastly

Fastly has been active since 2011, but grew to be one of the most mature and popular CDN providers. They offer an array of different services, among which private CDN and streaming media delivery. What you will like the most about it is it being a ‘real time CDN’, which means that the platform can deliver instantly even uncacheable content.

Level 3

Level 3 is the owner and main operator of Tier 1; with its own POPs distributed everywhere in the world. The CDN focuses on delivering videos and similar large objects, and belongs to Google’s Cloud Interconnect network.

Leaseweb

Leaseweb joins the list of established, enterprise-grade CDNs with years of experience and excellent performance. Before they launched a dedicated CDN network, Leaseweb’s experts delivered exclusively hosting services. Nowadays, they claim to have the most affordable prices among all of their competitors.

ChinaCache

ChinaCache, or as it is publicly traded NASDAQ (CCIH), was founded some time in 1998, which means it is officially the first CDN in this country, and one of the most experienced and knowledgeable provider to work with. Despite of being predominantly focused on the Chinese market, ChinaCache serves many multinational clients, and learns from them in order to improve the service is provides.

Swarmify

Swarmify is best known for reducing websites’ bandwidth, loading assets in an efficient manner, and being compatible with virtually any hosting solution or CD network. It will give you an unlimited number of POPs, as well as hyper-local connectivity.

You will also like its unique Hive Cache technology, which notifies you whenever a new visitor lands on your website, and signals the rest of the swarm whenever an asset is being moved or it expires. In such way, it automates cache expiration, and puts in place predictive loading to detect the most popular images for your visitors to preload them in the background.

It also pays a lot of attention to security, and encrypts all of your communication.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine provides you with the unique possibility to build and run your apps within Google’s infrastructure, which means that sudden changes in your traffic rates or data storage will require minimal adjustments instead of tedious work. There will be no servers involved – all you need to do is to upload our app, and you’re ready to go.

Google App Engine puts in place smart load balancing and automated scaling, and offers persistent sorting, storage, and transitioning of asynchronous task queries to make content work outside of the scope of users’ particular requests. At the same time, you will have the peace of mind that all your applications are running in a safe and reliable environment, and that growing data loads won’t affect their performance.

Google App Engine integrates tightly with similar cloud services, and offers open API to let you connect it to any third-party system.

jsDelivr

jsDelivr is best known as a free and open-source CDN solution that allows virtually anyone to host and distribute fonts, CSS, jQuery, and JavaScript files. It is sponsored directly by CloudFlare and MaxCDN, and it combines the best of both platforms. You can use it to balance traffic loads based on how users are performing (the feature is called Cedexis), and improve uptime with even two fully-operational CDN instances. This means that even in case one CDN provider goes down, traffic will be transferred to the other, and no conversions will be lost.

Another handy advantage is that jsDelivr hosts all files on NetDNA servers’ push zones, which means you need a whitelisted IP address to access them. At the moment, it operates on more than 42 POP locations around the world, all ready to handle unlimited HTTPS access and traffic, and protected in line with DDoS standards.

CDNvideo

CDNvideo was first introduced in April 2010, to become one of the leading CDN service for CIS and Russia. It is particularly well-known for its knowledgeable, 24/7 customer support.

MaxCDN

MaxCDN works with a number of SSD-loaded servers that are fully optimized for speed, and enable you to work with your own rules, and determine how content is about to be distributed. The company owns servers at multiple locations in the world (90 countries total), and thus has an admirable peer capacity to handle heavy content loads. An interesting possibility it provides is to lock content down using any of their secure tokens, or apply their REST APIs to connect the network to your resources and applications.

You can always purchase an extra plugin to make the platform work with a particular CMS (Drupal, WordPress, Magento, etc.), and you will have all of your content secured with built-in SSLs. MaxCDN is also popular by its best-path routing which keeps the speed and performance rates of your site consistent under all conditions.

CDNsun

Ever since 2012, CDNsun has been assisting businesses to accelerate their online performance and please their customers. The core mission of this service is to make CDN available even to on-budget users, providing at the same time enterprise-grade reliability. It will offer latency acceleration, fast software/game delivery, and on-demand and live video streaming.

Tata Communications

Tata Communications is a global, fully-featured CDN suite acquired by BitGravity in 2012. The service uses Tata’s worldwide infrastructure (i.e. the infrastructure of the largest and best known Tier 1 network so far) to peer relationships and enhance performance. You should also consider the service because of its flexible pricing scheme.

Best CDN services for streaming content

Video streaming is among today’s most popular web trends, and one that is nowhere close to disappearing from users’ preferences. People enjoy more and more consuming content this way, and stay alert for all new trends and technologies.

CDN services also help distribute video content, be those general-purpose one that include streaming as an on-demand module, or such entirely devoted to it. Video content is usually perceived as the largest and most cumbersome type to distribute and download, which requires these CDNs to be special in a certain way.

Akamai, for instance, is a popular KMC-empowered CDN used to broadcast live streams.

It comes with preinstalled encoding software (FMLE, for instance), that will encode your camera’s signal in real time, and send it through using secure RTMP connections. Next, you can use your Kaltura Player to enable the real-time broadcast on your website.

The settings and metadata of your live stream are managed in the same way you manage regular VOD content, and you can access them in the KMC. With a CDN in place, you will ensure impeccable experience for all viewers, regardless of where in the world they might be located.

Some experts argue that live video delivery may be slowly disappearing from the scene (to the benefit of HTTP streaming and ABR services), as it cannot be cached in the same way as previously recorder content. The favourable option in the case would be progressive downloading, unlike cases where you must download complete clips directly to your server.

This may still work for games, large desktop apps, or movies (there, users accept downloading times by default), but won’t be that tolerant for content that doesn’t ‘weigh’ more than 1 GB.

Progressive download broke out of its almost full anonymity with the development and expansion of YouTube. What happens while watching a YouTube video is that you’re actually waiting for the CDN to launch a progressive download, but are able to watch the file after only 3-5 seconds.

YouTube does this assuming that it can rely on your internet connection and available space to download the whole piece of video content, and has few additional mechanisms at stake for those that won’t be able to meet these conditions. For instance, with a connection that outpaces standard-definition bitrates, the clip will be fully downloaded before they’re halfway through watching it.

The biggest achievement of streaming technology is without doubt HTML streaming, a method tightly associated to ABR delivery and encoding. For the purpose, this type of streaming makes use of entirely generic HTTP servers (commonly Windows or Apache ones) in order to play on-demand videos the same way it displays the rest of the content (text and image files).

The role of the CDN here is to add adaptive bitrates, and to fragment the stream into separate chunks (2 to 10 seconds each). Consequently, there will be several discrete streams for different bitrates, and the user’s video player will capture and use feedback automatically. On the provider’s behalf, this means detecting the optimal network speed, and delivering video content instantly.

Streaming servers, on the other hand, will provide the content as soon as it is requested, but will only provide the bits that were demanded by the user. This may sound as a reasonable option for a content owner who prefers paying CDN services per bit, as he won’t be expected to cover the entire download for users who’ve abandoned watching halfway (without considering the speed of their internet connection).

Another trend that is gaining momentum is 4K Ultra HD, a whole new resolution format that is improving month by month. Its impact is huge, given that it is currently remaking the entire perception of how the visual media industry should operate, and paying a lot of attention to what customers need and expect.

The core of this format is high resolution and great quality for content owners who’d like to see their ultra HD pieces broadcasted worldwide. 2015 noted the first 4K screen display mobile phones, and it is already hard to imagine a device that is unable to render ultra HD video in a native resolution (3840 x 2160 pixels).

For 4K streaming technology to proliferate even more, work should be done with high-speed Internet connectivity. 4K streams load massive chunks of data, and content broadcasters must be ready to adopt those.

This is why 4K service providers are also contributing to faster connectivity, and looking to ensure at least 25Mbps of internet speed for every household (this is the bare minimum needed to enable HD video streaming). Aware of the work that has already been done to make Internet happen; we don’t have the slightest doubt that this will soon be a fact.

CDN services for developing and emerging markets

Markets worldwide that pride themselves with certain characteristics of developed markets, but still don’t meet all standards to be qualified as one, are those we call emerging markets. The category also considers markets expected to improve in the future, or such where development was slowed down for a specific reason.

Markets that are slightly slower in their development can be qualified as ‘frontier economies’, including China, Brazil, and the leader India.

Back in 2008, India’s e-commerce market was estimated at $2.5b billion, but noted significant increase during 2011 ($6.3 billion) and 2012 ($14 billion). 75% of this amount can be ascribed to travel related service providers (flight and railway tickets, rental booking, web mobile recharging, and more). Online retail services account for approximately 12.5%, on a market with more than 10 million online buyers and a growing internet usage base.

In June 2014, the internet users’ base was estimated to 250.2 million buyers, which revealed a whole new world of mobile e-commerce opportunities. The total number of transactions conducted via mobile devices for a single digit one just few years ago, while nowadays, companies are reporting even 50% of their profits coming from mobile transactions.

Basically, 50% of all 260 million internet users in India prefer accessing content from mobile devices, and more than 14% of them pay only in this way. With more and more users in rural India getting grasp of the Internet world, this number is only expected to grow in future.

Let’s give a look to the Brazilian CDN market: The estimated growth by 2019 is even $192.4 million, at a 13.9% CAGR for the entire forecasting period. The reason for such expansion is the enhanced use of Internet-empowered devices, including foremost smart phones and tablets. Internet consumption is also growing continuously, and the need for a more effective CDN solution has simply imposed itself.

China does not only have the largest population in the world, but can also flatter with the biggest number of active internet users (550 million overall, or 1 of every 5 active users in the world). For China, this means that nearly 50% of all its inhabitants are using the internet, and that this percentage is only continuing to grow with mobile browsing taking over it.

Leading CDNs are seriously challenged to deliver content to China, not only because of the number of users, but also because of the unique requirements and legislation of the country. For a content owner who wishes to make his services available to Chinese users, CDN may as well be the only way to accelerate delivery, and ensuring that the website is fully responsive.

As expensive as CDNs happen to be for such cause, the presence of a good one breaks even easier than investing in modifications to one’s own local.

Why do we believe that China has a huge potential to grow its online revenue? These are the 5 main reasons:

In only two years, China’s user base grew by additional 54 million, which means that the county now owns a market of even 618 million users.
China Etail won’t take long before it accounts for 16% of world’s total online consumption.
In the third quarter of 2012, China’s internet economy managed to reach $16 billion (109 billion of Chinese Yuan).
More than 60% of all Chinese consumers use their smartphones to browse for content.
More than 8% of all ecommerce deals can be ascribed to mobile sales, a number that grew 5-fold in the period of only three years.

Our next station is the Middle East and Africa, where content delivery network markets are also expected to reach incredible heights (an estimated $0.45 billion by 2019, at a CAGR of 15.6% for the entire forecasting period). The same as in China, these markets can boast with a growing number of smartphone users and Internet shoppers, which is why the countries embrace CDN technology to help them grow.

CDNs also make service delivery more proficient, as long as they respond to the limitations in quality delivery imposed by the regions’ legislature.

Put into perspective, all these numbers show us that CDN markets are growing, and reveal the great potential of economies and markets we describe as ‘emerging’. Thanks to CDNs, web content and data can be provided from various servers at a time, and this works just ideally for countries where the IT infrastructure is not exactly the best one.

CDNs also help serve users in a timely and proficient manner.

CDN and DNS

In case you don’t know what such pairing can do for you, it is time to learn. When associate with a CDN service, managed DNS solutions achieve top performance, flexibility, and reliability.

DNSs (or domain name systems) are hierarchy networks and naming methodologies for Internet resources (public and private ones). They gather and organize the data coming from several domain names, and assign it to different participating entities – thanks to them, all complex computer hostnames are translated to human-friendly IP addresses, and can be modified easily and quickly.

DNSs maintain your connections with customers

A DNS is the beginning of each user’s interaction with your website, and must function impeccably to ensure he/she can access your content. This means that you must manage your DNS solution to reduce the possibility of a complete network outage.

You will be expected to choose between professional DNS and CDN providers or the so-called ‘indie’ ones, in which case we recommend the later (in this scenario, you lose less when a combined network goes down).

A good reason to consider a combined DNS/CDN solution, on the other hand, is that it will provide the best possible website performance and content delivery, and make sure users enjoy their browsing experience. Such combinations also make governance easier for you, as you have the flexibility needed to update the site. Here is what DNS/CDN combos can do for you:

Help you swap to a new CDN
Allow you to add extra CDN
Balance easily between multiple endpoints
Reach an agreement with your providers

As we discussed previously, the DNS query is each user’s official encounter with a website, which means that upon his arrival on the landing page, tenths of different DNS queries are triggered to locate a good source for each piece of content.

If the DNS is poorly managed, loading times will be very slow (29% of all loading time factors are ascribed to DNS performance), and users will end up leaving the site and causing great loss for your business.

When done right, on the other hand, the DNS allows you to distribute traffic on several CDNs instead of one, and will optimize content delivery even when an invoked CDN is fully dysfunctional.

Amazon and Google prepared various studies on loading time effects, and concluded that a 1-3 seconds prolongation of a site’s loading time may lead to a 7% decrease of its sales.

DNSs systems are very scalable, and will grow in line with your business. Managed well, they will also be open to all sorts of updates and innovations, and you will find them incredibly useful for boosting revenue and reducing abandonment rates. At the end of each successful DNS applications story, there are also many satisfied customers that enjoy browsing for content. Indeed, first impressions matter!

Why use a paired DNS and CDN solution? These are the main reasons:

Optimal performance – The easiest way to optimize performance is to distribute traffic across several endpoints and CDNs.
Absolute reliability – A DNS/CDN provider will offer you automated failover support, so that even when a CDN fails, content remains available.
Universal availability – With an independent DNS service at your disposal, you can choose a CDN that corresponds to your geography, pricing, and features preferences. You will also have the possibility swap the provider at any point of time, and not affect in such way the quality of your service.

In most cases, it will be the CDN provider to offer you a dedicated DNS infrastructure, and implement and manage it on your behalf. Certain CDN providers have developed their own internal DNS network the support the core service they provide, but you shouldn’t expect them to provide the same scalability, flexibility, or performance of an independent DNS service provider.

On the opposite, managed DNS solutions complement CDNs by extending the website’s reliability and optimizing its performance, which makes them ideal for brands and businesses of all sizes. They commonly offer advanced load balancing, global footprints, and a variety of routing techniques that reduce latency, maximize access to content, and cut down the website owner’s costs.

Basically, DNSs separate online businesses from their consumers in a way which suits both sides, which e-retailers find extremely useful to improve end-users’ experience.

It is internet performance solutions that do the heavy-lifting of impeccable content delivery, and also help understand customer demographics and behaviour in order to run a successful business. From this point of view, we can easily conclude that the benefits of pairing DNS and CDNs are virtually endless.

Which other features will your DNS/CDN solution offer?
Preparedness for disaster (all outsourcing DNSs employ a sound failure prevention strategy)
Security coverage
DNS Analytics and Reports
Open API integrations for third-party software

Using CDNs to monitor web performance

The universally accepted truth is that content delivery networks help enhance the performance of a website, as they accelerate the services it provides, and make its content widely accessible. CDNs also have a dramatic effect on end users’ experience, and help sites rank better on search engines.

With all things put into perspective, it is not difficult to conclude that a CDN is a smart investment, but the challenge you will definitely face is deciding which one is the best for your website. Many factors and benchmarks will influence this decision, so it is about time to start looking at each of them:

Monitoring of server side performance

This is a testing method used that simulates actual data requests, and then estimates how long it takes for a page to respond to it. You can use it to determine an average response speed (not a perfect one), as the method doesn’t take into account the time needed for the document to be delivered, and doesn’t consider the actual length of the files.

This is why we categorize this method as a very unreliable one, as its results are always few second faster than the genuine loading time.

Monitoring of synthetic transactions

As you saw, server-side monitoring has few difficult-to-overcome drawbacks, which is why we recommend a different testing method. The monitoring of synthetic transactions also tests predefined data requests, but such coming from actual browsers and emulators, and different locations at a time.

Experts often qualify this method as being as close to an actual measure as possible, but you shouldn’t exclude the possibility of its results being inaccurate. The reason why this method fails is that you can’t test it for locations where your visitors will be coming from, but rather random ones, which means you’re still undermining the physical distance factor.

Measuring the performance of few users

Compared to the previous two, this method provides a much more accurate and faster way to measure sites’ performance, as it selects actual end users, and calculates how long pages take to display to them. Afterwards, it comes up with average numbers, and allows you to make conclusions on how your content delivery can be improved.

Measuring the performance of each end user

This is by all means the best and most accurate method you can use to measure your website’s performance. What it does is to collect data for all users, and measure all actual transactions across the network. In such way, it provides you with almost 100% accurate loading times, observed from the network’s, server’s, and application’s perspective.

You should keep in mind, however, that this method is really difficult and expensive to administer.

A good alternative we suggest is Last mile testing, which despite of all of its shortcomings, still manages to measure content delivery from the CDN servers to the end user’s device. It is packed with advanced connectivity services alike those needed to deliver content, which makes us believe that it is capable of depicting the real picture of how users interact with your content.

Depending on your specific requirements, there are some additional and very important benchmarks of CDN configuration that you should consider:

The number of POPs

As simple as that: The more points-of-presence your CDN provider will offer, the more customers and bandwidth that CDN will be able to respond to.

The network reach

For those of you looking to target a specific continent, or make content available all around the world, it is essential to choose a global CDN that covers all those markets.

Your current customers

According to the rule of thumb, you should choose a CDN provider whose services have been acquired by organizations similar to yours. There is little scientific proof to support this claim, especially considering the influence of pricing which may allow/obstruct a company from upgrading to a good CDN. If you have the possibility to get any CDN you wish, look for a fast and efficient one.

To monitor cloud performance actually means to measure the quality of service being provided to end customers. There are several components in this process to be taken into account (both front end and back end), as it is the entire IT infrastructure between the provider and the user that dictates the quality of delivery. This is why it is quite often that reports on the provider’s and the consumer’s end turn out to be different.

It won’t be enough to move your system to the cloud – you will also need an adequate monitoring tool, and a smart performance strategy as you’re entering this market. Such tools can be purchased by third-party providers, in which case we recommend you to go for a combo package instead of integrating few different products.

With all factors taken into account, you will be able to make the most out of the online acceleration services you’ve purchased.

Choosing a good content delivery network

With a website that attracts visits from different regions in the world, purchasing CDN services is a very smart decision. CDN services are also made very affordable nowadays, and you won’t have to double up traffic to cover for your investment.

It is only recently that the CDN market expanded towards small and midmarket users, and that made these services even more popular. You will most certainly be overwhelmed by CDN solutions and it will take a while to choose one that would work the best for your business – for the purpose, you ought to be familiar with all details, and have some helpful guidelines in mind.

Small and medium businesses find it particularly challenging to get to a good CDN, as they don’t have large and proficient IT departments, and were hardly required to follow technology developments all the time. We recommend them to prepare a clear list of needs and preferences before they turn to a service provider.

Everyone choosing a CDN for the first time should pay attention to these four factors:

Functionality
Performance
Pricing
Services

There are two main functionality questions your provider should respond to:

What should your CDN provider do for you?

CDN services are very different from each other, but there are some basic functions that are typical for all of them. These are Gzip connections, Origin-Pulls, and CNAME for secure web pages.

What will your CDN enable you to do?

Add these functions to your list of requirements:

Real-time views on your CDN usage statistics
FTP file uploads
API-empowered Purge-All options
The possibility to override caching headers sent by the origin server

Once you’ve determined all basic functions and requirements, give a look to the CDN’s performance:

The key here will be speed. You must know in advance how much it takes for your CDN to deliver files to end users, and be familiar with the following KPIs: latency (measured in milliseconds) and throughput (measured in kbit/s).

The provider should be clear on the minimal, maximal, average, and median value of each KPI, displayed for a larger period of time, and measured in conditions of peak and heavy traffic and normal one. Keep in mind that the location of your server won’t be decisive – delivery may still be very slow, especially if:

You’re working with a server that can’t manage a large number of concurrent visitor connections (they’re getting queued one after the other).
The provider uses old and slow hard drives
The server cannot meet the capacity of your load balancer
The servers’ internet pipe is very small

Certain CDNs are fully tuned to impeccable performance (SSD hard drives for instance), and will meet all of these criteria up to your expectations. They will display content immediately upon request and distribute the bytes very fast, and this is how you can recognize them:

Does the CDN offer a free trial or even a PoC (proof of concept) for those regions and countries that matter to you?
Does the test of their performance reveal some real CDN data or hypothetic assumptions?
Are the results comparable to other CDNs, and displayed in a way which is understandable to you?

If so, you have likely discovered an ideal CDN for your needs.

CDN providers pricing

Money will of course be a primary concern when choosing a CDN for your business, and there is a lot of thinking to do there. You will find all sorts of packages and promotional prices, and you need to collect as much payment info as you can in order to make a wise decision.

The common and most recommended scenario is custom pricing – find a provider of interest, share your budget details, and he will tailor an individual package that caters to the size and needs of your company. Providers that don’t adhere to the quote pricing trend usually offer several different packages targeting verticals and firms of different sizes.

Once you’ve settled the payment question, consider the customer support offered by your vendor.

The best possible version is to have a CDN provider who is there for you 24/7/365, available either via email, phone, or live chat. Availability, nevertheless, is not the only criterion that matters:

Check whether support agents are friendly, patient, and knowledgeable
Test the team to see how fast they can solve your problems
Test the quality of their account management
Look for such that will treat you as a partner, rather than ‘another customer’

Have in mind that you will be building a business relationship with your CDN provider, and that you will rely strongly on each other. This is why it is important to get as much information as you can, and get a feeling of how that partnership works before it has even begun.

If you liked this article about CDN providers, you should check out the following as well:

Ending thoughts on CDN providers

CDN services help website owners accelerate the delivery of their content, rank higher on search engines, and boost customer loyalty all though a single solution. As imposed by our ever-developing web community, internet has reached the point of realisation – the ultimate value of today’s brands can only be measured through the prism of customer satisfaction.

That’s what CDNs do the best, and we’re only scratching the surface of their potential at this moment. With their value in mind, we can safely assume the CDN market will become the flagship tool of emerging and developing markets, with the age of streaming already enhancing processing speed and giving customers a flawless video experience.

Where will CDN services be most useful? Let’s summarize:

Large sites with plenty of content which intend to serve lots of visitors
Sites devoted to streaming video files
Sites that share and offer other large media files (games, images, rich content, etc.)
Sites with heavy traffic coming from many different locations

Optimized delivery is not entirely a collateral benefit. As a website owner, you probably know that search engines dislike websites with long loading times, and will likely penalize poor performers. Their favourable sites are such that operate on various locations and still load content fast and without compromising users’ experience.

On the owner’s behalf, a good CDN also helps avoid service disruptions, and to provide mobile-friendly content. As you concluded by now, there is no need for second thoughts – you will either follow the trend, or be left behind it.

The post CDN providers: The best you could pick appeared first on Design your way.