9 ms·

CDNPerf[1] provides a real-time performance analysis of all major CDN providers. I have researched this space a lot, and my conclusions are: - Cloudflare: the

by krn 8y ago

CDNPerf[1] provides a real-time performance analysis of all major CDN providers. I have researched this space a lot, and my conclusions are: - Cloudflare: the best all-in-one solution, as long as you don't go above the Business tier - Fastly: the most technically advanced CDN, but also one of the most expensive ones (there is a reason why StackExchange and Reddit moved from Cloudflare to Fastly) - KeyCDN: the best fully-featured value-for-money CDN, if you just want to replace AWS Cloudfront CDN / Google Cloud CDN / Azure CDN - BunnyCDN: the best value-for-money CDN for distributing large static assets across the globe (can get as low as $0.0025 / GB) [1] https://www.cdnperf.com/ https://www.cdnperf.com/

mises 8y ago
Thank you for not making us read a blog post to learn this. I appreciate the information.
daper 8y ago
CDNPerf and DNSPerf services most likely do testing from some pool of VPSes or hosting services, although I can't see such details in their description. If you are interested how your service performs when serving to other servers, you can use it. If you are interested how it performs when serving to real people (home, mobile, offices), I wouldn't trust it. Your comparison is missing Akamai which is probably the most feature-rich and largest CDN.
- krn 8y ago
  I see CDNPerf and DNSPerf as a way to compare the providers relatively to each other, not as a trustworthy tool go get the real indications of time. I skipped Akamai, because it seems to be from the period of time, where the number of points of presence (PoPs) was used as the best indicator of the quality of a CDN. It might still be true in some of the third-world countries, but it's no longer the case in the developed world[1]. As for DNS providers: NS1 is like Fastly (the most advanced / premium), Rage4 is like KeyCDN (the best fully-featured value-for-money), and ClouDNS is like BunnyCDN (the best high-volume value-for-money). And Cloudflare is still Cloudflare. [1] https://www.fastly.com/blog/why-having-more-pops-isnt-always-better/ https://www.fastly.com/blog/why-having-more-pops-isnt-always...
  - daper 8y ago
    You're right. I was wondering how this company is able to collect such data from real users. It's registered in an apartment in Cracow, Poland, a 1-person company till last year (here is their company info in polish: http://www.krs-online.com.pl/perfops-sp-z-o-o-krs-10397838.html http://www.krs-online.com.pl/perfops-sp-z-o-o-krs-10397838.h... , still an apartment address) . Now looking at the Network tab in Developer Tools I can see they are running the tests from JS on their site using visitors of cdnperf.com. I can see requests for URLs like /500b-bench.jpg?t=1552402827417 to various domains.
    - jimaek 8y ago
      CDNPerf is owned by PerfOps, a VC funded startup. Lots of info here https://perfops.net https://perfops.net
  - ksec 8y ago
    >NS1 is like Fastly Except NS1 don't actually offer any pricing. Rage4, are they being used by any big players site? I mean KeyCDN, despite its price are actually pretty decent and have quite a few Enterprise customers. And no mention of DNSMadeEasy?
    - krn 8y ago
      > Except NS1 don't actually offer any pricing. That's true, and it might have been a good enough reason to exclude it from the comparison, as I did with Akamai for CDN. Yet, unlike with Akamai, nothing seems to come really close to NS1 in DNS space. > Rage4, are they being used by any big players site? That's its major downside. It has no competition in terms of the price / performance ratio, but might be not big enough company for major players to put a trust in. Still, Rage4 is regarded with respect by others in its own industry: BunnyCDN uses it for distributing the traffic, and Cloudflare's employee recommends it when Cloudflare doesn't fit[1]. > And no mention of DNSMadeEasy? I found it to be neither the most technically advanced, nor the best value-for-money. It might be a good option for those who don't have enough justification for NS1, and enough confidence in Rage4. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12052830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12052830
- jakejarvis 8y ago
  I believe they used to benchmark via their own pool of test servers, but according to the sidebar they're now collecting "real user metrics" somehow: > All results are based on RUM (Real User Metrics) data from users all over the world > We gather and analyze more than 300million tests every day > "RUM Uptime" shows the uptime of CDN providers as measured by real users. Due to bad Internet connections this number can contain false positives. Agreed about Akamai, though — it appears to be clearly faster than those listed (they certainly had a HUGE head start). But also by far the most expensive. You get what you pay for in this industry!
- foobarbazetc 8y ago
  They’re a good macro view of latency though. You need to do your own testing to get real world results.
jbergstroem 8y ago
Coverage is a Big Deal. Fastly used to be pretty unavailable in South America but has since last year improved coverage (esp via west, in Chile). I'd also like to add that with Cloudflare workers the technology lead of fastly (VCL, edge configuration) has reduced significantly. Note about bias: I've used both cdn's for years but mostly opt for Cloudflare today.
dxhdr 8y ago
> Cloudflare: the best all-in-one solution, as long as you don't go above the Business tier Do they require you to go above the Business tier for high CDN traffic levels?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zackbloom 8y ago
  No, any amount of traffic can be served at any plan level.
- leafo 8y ago
  Yes, if you use too much bandwidth a business rep will reach out to you and tell you that you must upgrade to a per gb plan to continue using their service. In my case, I think I was at about 40TB a month
  - dxhdr 8y ago
    That's what I was suspecting but couldn't find any claims of that on their site. Is a per-gb plan different from Enterprise? How much do they charge per gb?
  - jgrahamc 8y ago
    If one of our reps told you that you are forced to upgrade then I would like to see that email because you will not be forced into upgrading.
    - celsoazevedo 8y ago
      I'm happy with CF's service and this isn't a complaint. I was serving ~80TB of data (mostly in South America) and paying 80 or so dollars/month, so I completely understand why I was contacted. But I keep seeing these messages that people aren't forced to upgrade and that traffic is truly unlimited... This was the first email: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/01.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/01.png I then replied that I couldn't afford an Enterprise plan and that I understood about the costs of serving 80TB. I was offered a $3000 plan: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/02.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/02.png I explained that 3k was too expensive for me, but I would be fine with something up to $500 even if that meant less POPs/features. Or I could leave Cloudflare too. The price dropped to $1500: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/03.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/03.png I asked for a few days so I could move some heavy files (under the 512MB limit) to a ~$120 OVH server and reduced CF's usage to under 2TB/month. Again, I'm not complaining. I still use CF's service (last month I used over 150TB with Backblaze B2), but it's true that some users receive emails telling them to upgrade and that sometimes these emails imply that the site will be kicked out if nothing is done.
porker 8y ago
> - Fastly: the most technically advanced CDN, but also one of the most expensive ones (there is a reason why StackExchange and Reddit moved from Cloudflare to Fastly) Especially with the crazy SSL pricing. I appreciate there are technical difficulties, but LetsEncrypt has been out what - 2 years? And Fastly still want $100/month for a shared certificate.
- jakejarvis 8y ago
  Yup, that was a major barrier for us. Worth noting that they charge this much even if you want to use a Let's Encrypt cert [0]. [0] https://support.fastly.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360040168731/comments/360004237731 https://support.fastly.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/36004016...
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  Even worse when you consider that their biggest competitor gives SSL away to free tier customers.
  - porker 8y ago
    I happen to like VCL and what you can do with it. I would rather Fastly got coverage for what's possible, rather than Cloudflare Workers getting all the blog articles. But without a cheap/free tier for smaller projects (and all my tech skills have been honed on small projects and then applied to large clients) they are not going to attract that coverage.
- foobarbazetc 8y ago
  Fastly also don’t support proxying WebSockets. They told us we should switch to long polling which would have driven up our costs with them significantly since they charge per request — funny how that works. Still, definitely the most interesting CDN if you can’t do your own thing. Network still isn’t where Akamai or EdgeCast are. Lots of good people there, though.
  - jkarneges 8y ago
zackbloom 8y ago
(I work at Cloudflare) The Reddit and StackExchange stories are before my time, but I believe they related to reliability issues we were having at the time. It was over three years ago at this point, a lot has changed. I have a personal connection with your comparison because my company actually used Fastly before I joined Cloudflare, I had the exact perception you're describing. Four years later, being able to write JavaScript with Workers would have made my life so much easier than trying to do failover in VCL as I was then.
- foobarbazetc 8y ago
  Not arguing that VCL doesn’t suck hard, but check out: https://www.fastlylabs.com/ https://www.fastlylabs.com/
artellectual 8y ago
CDNPerf is great. I actually used them to choose which CDN to use for video on demand streaming. I ended up going with Google CDN. My benchmark was how many complaints I got from students on my platform[1]. - Cloudflare doesn't distribute hls segments they will just route everything to LAX - Bunny CDN had a few - KeyCDN had a few but better than Bunny CDN - StackPath had a few but better than Bunny CDN - Google CDN had 0 complaints No youtube, Vimeo etc... All video streaming / hosting is done in house. Streams about 500GB to 600GB / month. I pay about 40 USD / month for Google CDN bandwidth. I used CDNPerf pricing calculator, it's spot on. [1] https://www.codemy.net https://www.codemy.net.
- anonymoushn 8y ago
  (edited: I work at Cloudflare) Can you clarify the problem you had with Cloudflare? It should work for this sort of use case.
  - artellectual 8y ago
    I don't think you can, because Cloudflare Video CDN is a separate product. So offering it a long with your business / free package is against your business interest. Cloudflare basically tried to sell me a $1000 / month (minimum) Video CDN. But if it was a mistake and should this be able to work using Cloudflare I would happily pay to upgrade to the business plan. I can afford 20-40 USD / month not $1000
    - anonymoushn 8y ago
      I'm not sure what our minimum plan level that allows using us for mostly video is, but it's almost certainly independent of Cloudflare Stream.
  - lukeqsee 8y ago
    A major client of mine was recently shut down (without notice) because one of our major products is video streaming. Apparently that’s now against the Cloudflare’s TOS (unless, of course, we used CloudFlare’s streaming product at rates that make us unprofitable). We left without looking back, because interrupting our primary product without notice is unacceptable in every situation (except the very, very few aggregious fringe cases).
partiallypro 8y ago
We use Cloudflare and AzureCDN together
Rafuino 8y ago
I wish they'd show at least 99th percentile latency (if not higher) in the comparison charts, not the average. Average is the wrong way to measure latency.

by krn 8y ago

mises 8y ago

Thank you for not making us read a blog post to learn this. I appreciate the information.

daper 8y ago

CDNPerf and DNSPerf services most likely do testing from some pool of VPSes or hosting services, although I can't see such details in their description. If you are interested how your service performs when serving to other servers, you can use it. If you are interested how it performs when serving to real people (home, mobile, offices), I wouldn't trust it. Your comparison is missing Akamai which is probably the most feature-rich and largest CDN.

krn 8y ago
I see CDNPerf and DNSPerf as a way to compare the providers relatively to each other, not as a trustworthy tool go get the real indications of time. I skipped Akamai, because it seems to be from the period of time, where the number of points of presence (PoPs) was used as the best indicator of the quality of a CDN. It might still be true in some of the third-world countries, but it's no longer the case in the developed world[1]. As for DNS providers: NS1 is like Fastly (the most advanced / premium), Rage4 is like KeyCDN (the best fully-featured value-for-money), and ClouDNS is like BunnyCDN (the best high-volume value-for-money). And Cloudflare is still Cloudflare. [1] https://www.fastly.com/blog/why-having-more-pops-isnt-always-better/ https://www.fastly.com/blog/why-having-more-pops-isnt-always...
- daper 8y ago
  You're right. I was wondering how this company is able to collect such data from real users. It's registered in an apartment in Cracow, Poland, a 1-person company till last year (here is their company info in polish: http://www.krs-online.com.pl/perfops-sp-z-o-o-krs-10397838.html http://www.krs-online.com.pl/perfops-sp-z-o-o-krs-10397838.h... , still an apartment address) . Now looking at the Network tab in Developer Tools I can see they are running the tests from JS on their site using visitors of cdnperf.com. I can see requests for URLs like /500b-bench.jpg?t=1552402827417 to various domains.
  - jimaek 8y ago
    CDNPerf is owned by PerfOps, a VC funded startup. Lots of info here https://perfops.net https://perfops.net
- ksec 8y ago
  >NS1 is like Fastly Except NS1 don't actually offer any pricing. Rage4, are they being used by any big players site? I mean KeyCDN, despite its price are actually pretty decent and have quite a few Enterprise customers. And no mention of DNSMadeEasy?
  - krn 8y ago
    > Except NS1 don't actually offer any pricing. That's true, and it might have been a good enough reason to exclude it from the comparison, as I did with Akamai for CDN. Yet, unlike with Akamai, nothing seems to come really close to NS1 in DNS space. > Rage4, are they being used by any big players site? That's its major downside. It has no competition in terms of the price / performance ratio, but might be not big enough company for major players to put a trust in. Still, Rage4 is regarded with respect by others in its own industry: BunnyCDN uses it for distributing the traffic, and Cloudflare's employee recommends it when Cloudflare doesn't fit[1]. > And no mention of DNSMadeEasy? I found it to be neither the most technically advanced, nor the best value-for-money. It might be a good option for those who don't have enough justification for NS1, and enough confidence in Rage4. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12052830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12052830
jakejarvis 8y ago
I believe they used to benchmark via their own pool of test servers, but according to the sidebar they're now collecting "real user metrics" somehow: > All results are based on RUM (Real User Metrics) data from users all over the world > We gather and analyze more than 300million tests every day > "RUM Uptime" shows the uptime of CDN providers as measured by real users. Due to bad Internet connections this number can contain false positives. Agreed about Akamai, though — it appears to be clearly faster than those listed (they certainly had a HUGE head start). But also by far the most expensive. You get what you pay for in this industry!
foobarbazetc 8y ago
They’re a good macro view of latency though. You need to do your own testing to get real world results.

jbergstroem 8y ago

Coverage is a Big Deal. Fastly used to be pretty unavailable in South America but has since last year improved coverage (esp via west, in Chile). I'd also like to add that with Cloudflare workers the technology lead of fastly (VCL, edge configuration) has reduced significantly. Note about bias: I've used both cdn's for years but mostly opt for Cloudflare today.

dxhdr 8y ago

> Cloudflare: the best all-in-one solution, as long as you don't go above the Business tier Do they require you to go above the Business tier for high CDN traffic levels?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zackbloom 8y ago
No, any amount of traffic can be served at any plan level.
leafo 8y ago
Yes, if you use too much bandwidth a business rep will reach out to you and tell you that you must upgrade to a per gb plan to continue using their service. In my case, I think I was at about 40TB a month
- dxhdr 8y ago
  That's what I was suspecting but couldn't find any claims of that on their site. Is a per-gb plan different from Enterprise? How much do they charge per gb?
- jgrahamc 8y ago
  If one of our reps told you that you are forced to upgrade then I would like to see that email because you will not be forced into upgrading.
  - celsoazevedo 8y ago
    I'm happy with CF's service and this isn't a complaint. I was serving ~80TB of data (mostly in South America) and paying 80 or so dollars/month, so I completely understand why I was contacted. But I keep seeing these messages that people aren't forced to upgrade and that traffic is truly unlimited... This was the first email: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/01.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/01.png I then replied that I couldn't afford an Enterprise plan and that I understood about the costs of serving 80TB. I was offered a $3000 plan: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/02.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/02.png I explained that 3k was too expensive for me, but I would be fine with something up to $500 even if that meant less POPs/features. Or I could leave Cloudflare too. The price dropped to $1500: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/03.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2019/03.png I asked for a few days so I could move some heavy files (under the 512MB limit) to a ~$120 OVH server and reduced CF's usage to under 2TB/month. Again, I'm not complaining. I still use CF's service (last month I used over 150TB with Backblaze B2), but it's true that some users receive emails telling them to upgrade and that sometimes these emails imply that the site will be kicked out if nothing is done.

porker 8y ago

> - Fastly: the most technically advanced CDN, but also one of the most expensive ones (there is a reason why StackExchange and Reddit moved from Cloudflare to Fastly) Especially with the crazy SSL pricing. I appreciate there are technical difficulties, but LetsEncrypt has been out what - 2 years? And Fastly still want $100/month for a shared certificate.

jakejarvis 8y ago
Yup, that was a major barrier for us. Worth noting that they charge this much even if you want to use a Let's Encrypt cert [0]. [0] https://support.fastly.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360040168731/comments/360004237731 https://support.fastly.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/36004016...
shittyadmin 8y ago
Even worse when you consider that their biggest competitor gives SSL away to free tier customers.
- porker 8y ago
  I happen to like VCL and what you can do with it. I would rather Fastly got coverage for what's possible, rather than Cloudflare Workers getting all the blog articles. But without a cheap/free tier for smaller projects (and all my tech skills have been honed on small projects and then applied to large clients) they are not going to attract that coverage.
foobarbazetc 8y ago
Fastly also don’t support proxying WebSockets. They told us we should switch to long polling which would have driven up our costs with them significantly since they charge per request — funny how that works. Still, definitely the most interesting CDN if you can’t do your own thing. Network still isn’t where Akamai or EdgeCast are. Lots of good people there, though.
- jkarneges 8y ago

zackbloom 8y ago

(I work at Cloudflare) The Reddit and StackExchange stories are before my time, but I believe they related to reliability issues we were having at the time. It was over three years ago at this point, a lot has changed. I have a personal connection with your comparison because my company actually used Fastly before I joined Cloudflare, I had the exact perception you're describing. Four years later, being able to write JavaScript with Workers would have made my life so much easier than trying to do failover in VCL as I was then.

foobarbazetc 8y ago
Not arguing that VCL doesn’t suck hard, but check out: https://www.fastlylabs.com/ https://www.fastlylabs.com/

artellectual 8y ago

CDNPerf is great. I actually used them to choose which CDN to use for video on demand streaming. I ended up going with Google CDN. My benchmark was how many complaints I got from students on my platform[1]. - Cloudflare doesn't distribute hls segments they will just route everything to LAX - Bunny CDN had a few - KeyCDN had a few but better than Bunny CDN - StackPath had a few but better than Bunny CDN - Google CDN had 0 complaints No youtube, Vimeo etc... All video streaming / hosting is done in house. Streams about 500GB to 600GB / month. I pay about 40 USD / month for Google CDN bandwidth. I used CDNPerf pricing calculator, it's spot on. [1] https://www.codemy.net https://www.codemy.net.

anonymoushn 8y ago
(edited: I work at Cloudflare) Can you clarify the problem you had with Cloudflare? It should work for this sort of use case.
- artellectual 8y ago
  I don't think you can, because Cloudflare Video CDN is a separate product. So offering it a long with your business / free package is against your business interest. Cloudflare basically tried to sell me a $1000 / month (minimum) Video CDN. But if it was a mistake and should this be able to work using Cloudflare I would happily pay to upgrade to the business plan. I can afford 20-40 USD / month not $1000
  - anonymoushn 8y ago
    I'm not sure what our minimum plan level that allows using us for mostly video is, but it's almost certainly independent of Cloudflare Stream.
- lukeqsee 8y ago
  A major client of mine was recently shut down (without notice) because one of our major products is video streaming. Apparently that’s now against the Cloudflare’s TOS (unless, of course, we used CloudFlare’s streaming product at rates that make us unprofitable). We left without looking back, because interrupting our primary product without notice is unacceptable in every situation (except the very, very few aggregious fringe cases).

partiallypro 8y ago

We use Cloudflare and AzureCDN together

Rafuino 8y ago

I wish they'd show at least 99th percentile latency (if not higher) in the comparison charts, not the average. Average is the wrong way to measure latency.