About CDN Services
A Content Delivery Network or CDN service allows you to load your website’s static content such as images and videos in a fast and efficient way. Such a service has servers across different geographical locations. This ensures faster content loading, which directly affects your website’s speed. Here are 4 CDN services that you could choose from for your website.
MaxCDN
One of the most popular CDN services, MaxCDN is associated with some major names. These names include WP Engine and the Washington Times. It is easy to set up MaxCDN if you are using W3 Total Cache. Once set up, it will serve up everything including images, video, CSS files and JavaScript. It has an elegant control panel that shows the CDN usage data for your site. It can also provide access to advanced information. Gain access to user locations, hourly breakdown and top 50 files.
MaxCDN has its servers placed all across the major locations. It has dozens of peer partners in Europe and North America to help minimize hops between ISPs.
CloudFlare
CloudFlare is one of the most widely used CDN services. They don’t charge you for bandwidth use based on the popularity of your site. The service claims that your website will become 2 times faster. It will use two-thirds lesser bandwidth and have two-thirds fewer requests. Based on Anycast, CloudFlare has over two dozen data centers all over the world. It can instantly route visitors to the data center with the nearest proximity.
CacheFly
CacheFly is another popular CDN service with companies like Adobe, Microsoft and LG using it. It has a fast, 10-minute set up. It provides real-time monitoring, but you can expect it to be quite expensive.
CacheFly is the pioneer in the TCP Anycast based CDN. This different from traditional web hosting solutions. It minimizes latency and offers a more reliable way for files to get routed to the nearest server.
CloudLayer
Powered by SoftLayer, CloudLayer uses multiple nodes worldwide for dynamically serving cached content to visitors. It uses a node close to the user to serve content from the host server. This minimizes the distance the data requires to travel, thus reducing latency. Their CDN services are available in a couple of content delivery options. This allows you to optimize your cost and end-user experience.
CloudLayer CDN is available in two different content delivery options. This lets you optimize your end-user experience and cost – Pop Pull and Origin Pull.
Which one of these CDN services do you use? Is there a reason you like yours over others? What helped you to make your decision? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the best CDN services out there.