5 ms·

What's the best cdn right now? Cloudfront is just expensive as hell.

edaemon 9y ago
In terms of price I still haven't found anything better than CloudFlare. If performance is the goal all the testing I've done for work shows Akamai as the leader, though not by a lot. Fastly is making strides to compete with both, as well.
eric_b 9y ago
I would have said MaxCDN, but they recently got "acquired" by StackPath, so who knows what direction that's going.
- mprev 9y ago
  Why the quote marks around acquired?
  - eric_b 9y ago
    StackPath came out of nowhere. As far as I could tell at the time, they didn't have any public products. And all of a sudden they bought MaxCDN. I could never tell if it was actually an acquisition or more of a merger or something else?
    - manigandham 9y ago
      Stackpath is from the founder of Softlayer. Raised private equity money and acquired several companies including MaxCDN to start a new service. The subbrands still exist but are slowly migrating and will refer you to the stackpath products. https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/25/security-as-a-service-startup-stackpath-nabs-180m-4-acquisitions-including-maxcdn/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/25/security-as-a-service-star...
      - Elof 9y ago
        Hi there. I'm DevRel at StackPath. We have an will continue to support the businesses that we have acquired, but the long term plan is to roll everything into a single platform under the StackPath umbrella. Our customers won't see much if any difference in service other then better performance and more features/products when we migrate them.
- tedivm 9y ago
  They were acquired in July of 2016, so about 20 months ago. It seems to be more of a merger than an acquisition, and both brands have stayed separate but share expertise and data centers. It honestly seemed like a good way for both of them to expand their footprint while also reducing overhead.
vira28 9y ago
Heard good things about cloudflare
tedivm 9y ago
Alright, I'll go through the list. * Cloudfront would be great for the North America and Europe they only charged for the bandwidth (those prices are reasonable), but charging for the HTTP request (and the huge premium on HTTPS). The bandwidth prices outside of those areas are absolutely awful though. * Akamai makes Cloudfront look cheap. * Cloudflare has ethical concerns that keep me away from them. * Fastly is susceptible to DDoS's against the origin in some interesting ways. * Limelight was great but then Goldman Sachs bought and destroyed them. * EdgeCast was by far my favorite, but then they got bought by Verizon. Assuming Verizon hasn't fucked it up then they're definitely worth checking out, as their reporting tools were amazing and their performance was literally the best (my information is a few years out of date though on this one). * If you want to serve people in China you will need to pay a China based (government owned) CDN or your traffic will get blocked for no reason once you get large enough. Conveniently enough one of their sales people will reach out to you about a day or two before the block goes into effect. * MaxCDN isn't bad, but I haven't seen their higher tier prices (above 25TB) so I can't comment on that. Their South America and Asia coverage is pretty bad though- nothing in India, only one datacenter in Brazil for all of South America (with another being built, but also in Brazil), no Africa, no Middle East. If you're starting english only this isn't the worst, but eventually you'll need to go to a multiple CDN solution for broad coverage.
- alexkon 9y ago
  Can you elaborate on Fastly exposing the origin servers to DDoS? Is there a link to learn more about that?
  - tedivm 9y ago
    The Fastly "Purge API" by default does not require authentication. This is why you can clear the cache on Github pages directly [1]. From there you can force requests to hit the origin server by first purging the data from the cache and then requesting it. Unrelated to DDoS I've also seen issues with the Fastly routing- it doesn't always pick the greatest end node to have a client connect to. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26898052/how-to-force-image-cache-update-in-readme-rst-on-github https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26898052/how-to-force-im...
nik736 9y ago
Check out https://www.cdnperf.com https://www.cdnperf.com
lenovouser 9y ago
CDN77 is pretty awesome
manigandham 9y ago
Cloudflare. Cheap, fast and powerful. They seem to be doing everything right, as evidenced by all the growth and great features in a single package. It's rather surprising the other vendors aren't doing anything to even catch up. If you need more control, than Fastly is very technical, although the recently launched Cloudflare workers give you much more programmability by running javascript. For more traditional options, look at the quiet upstart Stackpath which is built upon the old MaxCDN network, and also CDN77 which is great value.

In terms of price I still haven't found anything better than CloudFlare. If performance is the goal all the testing I've done for work shows Akamai as the leader, though not by a lot. Fastly is making strides to compete with both, as well.

eric_b 9y ago

I would have said MaxCDN, but they recently got "acquired" by StackPath, so who knows what direction that's going.

mprev 9y ago
Why the quote marks around acquired?
- eric_b 9y ago
  StackPath came out of nowhere. As far as I could tell at the time, they didn't have any public products. And all of a sudden they bought MaxCDN. I could never tell if it was actually an acquisition or more of a merger or something else?
  - manigandham 9y ago
    Stackpath is from the founder of Softlayer. Raised private equity money and acquired several companies including MaxCDN to start a new service. The subbrands still exist but are slowly migrating and will refer you to the stackpath products. https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/25/security-as-a-service-startup-stackpath-nabs-180m-4-acquisitions-including-maxcdn/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/25/security-as-a-service-star...
    - Elof 9y ago
      Hi there. I'm DevRel at StackPath. We have an will continue to support the businesses that we have acquired, but the long term plan is to roll everything into a single platform under the StackPath umbrella. Our customers won't see much if any difference in service other then better performance and more features/products when we migrate them.
tedivm 9y ago
They were acquired in July of 2016, so about 20 months ago. It seems to be more of a merger than an acquisition, and both brands have stayed separate but share expertise and data centers. It honestly seemed like a good way for both of them to expand their footprint while also reducing overhead.

vira28 9y ago

Heard good things about cloudflare

tedivm 9y ago

Alright, I'll go through the list. * Cloudfront would be great for the North America and Europe they only charged for the bandwidth (those prices are reasonable), but charging for the HTTP request (and the huge premium on HTTPS). The bandwidth prices outside of those areas are absolutely awful though. * Akamai makes Cloudfront look cheap. * Cloudflare has ethical concerns that keep me away from them. * Fastly is susceptible to DDoS's against the origin in some interesting ways. * Limelight was great but then Goldman Sachs bought and destroyed them. * EdgeCast was by far my favorite, but then they got bought by Verizon. Assuming Verizon hasn't fucked it up then they're definitely worth checking out, as their reporting tools were amazing and their performance was literally the best (my information is a few years out of date though on this one). * If you want to serve people in China you will need to pay a China based (government owned) CDN or your traffic will get blocked for no reason once you get large enough. Conveniently enough one of their sales people will reach out to you about a day or two before the block goes into effect. * MaxCDN isn't bad, but I haven't seen their higher tier prices (above 25TB) so I can't comment on that. Their South America and Asia coverage is pretty bad though- nothing in India, only one datacenter in Brazil for all of South America (with another being built, but also in Brazil), no Africa, no Middle East. If you're starting english only this isn't the worst, but eventually you'll need to go to a multiple CDN solution for broad coverage.

alexkon 9y ago
Can you elaborate on Fastly exposing the origin servers to DDoS? Is there a link to learn more about that?
- tedivm 9y ago
  The Fastly "Purge API" by default does not require authentication. This is why you can clear the cache on Github pages directly [1]. From there you can force requests to hit the origin server by first purging the data from the cache and then requesting it. Unrelated to DDoS I've also seen issues with the Fastly routing- it doesn't always pick the greatest end node to have a client connect to. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26898052/how-to-force-image-cache-update-in-readme-rst-on-github https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26898052/how-to-force-im...

nik736 9y ago

Check out https://www.cdnperf.com https://www.cdnperf.com

lenovouser 9y ago

CDN77 is pretty awesome

manigandham 9y ago

Cloudflare. Cheap, fast and powerful. They seem to be doing everything right, as evidenced by all the growth and great features in a single package. It's rather surprising the other vendors aren't doing anything to even catch up. If you need more control, than Fastly is very technical, although the recently launched Cloudflare workers give you much more programmability by running javascript. For more traditional options, look at the quiet upstart Stackpath which is built upon the old MaxCDN network, and also CDN77 which is great value.