Fast equals good in our era. Especially when it comes to websites rich in content, mobile applications, or other digital products - if you wish to provide a fast experience to your users and customers regardless of their geographical location, you should utilize the power of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).
A CDN caches a copy of your website, multimedia, or project assets in multiple data centers worldwide. When the user requests access to your data, a copy is retrieved from the nearest server, shortening the loading time and keeping your users happy.
In this article, we aim to present you with some of the best and most popular CDN providers on the market. So if you're considering a suitable CDN provider for your multilingual digital product, this list should be an ideal starting point for helping you to step in the right direction.
🚩 Localazy Language CDN 🔗
The main reasons for choosing a particular CDN include geographical coverage, latency, security, and specialty. At Localazy, we've built our own CDN to deliver language assets. It allows us to speed up the content delivery for our clients who localize their multilingual sites and applications with Localazy.
We specialize in the delivery of language file assets.
Our robust localization CDN is powered by Amazon AWS, allowing you to serve multilingual content to users with minimal latency from multiple data centers spread globally.
🚀 The benefits of Localazy CDN 🔗
Before continuing our list of CDN providers, let's talk about the benefits of using the Localazy CDN for your multilingual online product from the perspective of developers, users, and, most importantly, yourself.
Developers: Fully automated localization delivery 🔗
Automation saves your development team precious time. Localazy CDN effectively shortens the release cycle and reduces the room for error because it takes one of the variables out of the equation! Once you have everything set up, you won't have to worry about releasing new languages into your online product.
Localazy CDN is also compatible with different releases of your localizable files in Localazy. All your release tags are automatically available so that you can serve the fresh files for your testing, and once you are sure of their quality, you can push them to production.
Users: Instant worldwide coverage 🔗
Serve your users freshly translated content in a matter of minutes. All changes published in Localazy will propagate across all CDN points of presence in minutes. Users are always served the file from the closes geographical location, making the load times shorter and the experience more seamless.
You: Infinitely scaleable for a fair price 🔗
Our CDN is built on proven and scalable technologies, so you don't need to worry about whether you have ten or ten million users. You can start using the CDN for under $1/month and always keep track of your costs on the dashboard. We serve terabytes of data and hundreds of millions of requests monthly. Localazy CDN is infinitely scaleable and grows with your business.
Learn more about Localazy CDN Pricing
🌐 Most popular CDN providers 🔗
2. Cloudflare 🔗
Some of the most popular companies worldwide, such as Shopify, Canva, and Zendesk, rely on Cloudflare to keep their services up and running. Cloudflare is available in over 250 countries, offering various services, including a content delivery network (CDN), domain name system (DNS), and, most importantly, security solutions.
In regards to content, the service offers both dynamic and static content delivery solutions. When you sign up for their plans, you're presented with their wide area of services such as lossless image optimization, unmetered DDos protection, a Web Application Firewall (WAF), etc. Find more about their plans here.
3. Amazon CloudFront 🔗
CloudFront is a CDN offered by Amazon, and it relies on its global infrastructure, which includes systems such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Elastic Load Balancing. Considering its complex integration nature, the CDN is highly appropriate for OTT providers and digital media providers.
The only downside of Amazon CloudFront could be its steep learning curve. It takes deep technical knowledge to integrate it, even though not everyone finds it hard. However, as long as you have the right people who can set it up, that can turn into a positive aspect since it allows for detailed customizations.
4. Akamai CDN 🔗
The CDN services provided by Akamai are definitely worth a shot since the company ranks among senior companies in the space. Founded in 1998, its services are suitable for businesses of all sizes. As one of the oldest companies in the market, they have coverage in over 135 countries and claim to service 30% of the internet.
Similarly to CloudFront, Akamai comes with advanced features which are challenging to navigate if you're not an expert. Also, the company has fallen down the ranks for a while, as the #11 CDN based on query speed, according to CDNPerf. At the moment of writing, the first rank is held by one of the CDNs on this list, bunny.net.
5. Fastly 🔗
If you've ever read the daily New York Times issues online, you've already benefited from using Fastly. As an internet security, streaming & video, and CDN services provider, the company fuels the content delivery of thousands of sites around the world, including NYT, Giphy, Linktree, and wikiHow.
The company has around 80 Points of Presence (PoPs) worldwide, which function as locations where the data is cached and distributed. They offer excellent service, but they're also remembered for the major outage on 8th June 2021, affecting popular sites such as NYT, Reddit, and Amazon. However, the issue was resolved quickly, and companies like New York Times still continue to rely on them after the incident.
6. StackPath 🔗
Employing around 300 people, StackPath was founded in 2015, and since then, it has grown swiftly in terms of capacity and features. So far, it's present in 43 markets, with a range of 70+ Edge locations. They allow you to deploy your own virtual appliances, distributed workloads, or edge clouds of your own with serverless solutions requiring zero warmup time.
Customers state that StackPath might not be an excellent option for multi-tiered web applications or delivering 100s of TBs of traffic. And as seen on the review site, G2, the recent pricing update seems to have upset many long-term customers. However, StackPath is an excellent option for startups, and it comes with many useful features.
7. Edgio (formerly known as Limelight Networks) 🔗
Limelight Networks went through significant changes in the last years. The acquisition of Edgecast was a big move that marked a rebranding under the name of Edgio. Acquiring a Yahoo-owned company boosted their service qualities and added more capabilities to their offering. As per their CDN solutions, they offer two separate services: Next-Gen WebCDN and Global CDN.
Edgio's capabilities are impressive. It has over 300 PoPs with 250+ Tbps of capacity and over 7,000 global interconnections to last-mile networks, which creates shortcut pathways so content can reach your users quicker. However, users show dissatisfaction regarding the service speed during live webcasting.
8. KeyCDN 🔗
KeyCDN is a CDN provider based in Switzerland with a network coverage spanning six continents. It provides a wide range of features, including Origin Shield, which lets you select a server other than the origin to handle updates, reducing server load. Furthermore, you can effortlessly monitor your CDN performance and use Block Referrer to blacklist the domains that hotlink content and images, which reduces your bandwidth costs.
However, compared to other popular CDNs, KeyCDN has only around 50 active PoPs, which is significantly lower than its competitors. This isn't an indicator of lower service quality as long as your audience is found in these areas. For more information on their availability zones and their status, check this status page.
9. CDN77 🔗
If the name sounds complex when you say it out loud, it might actually be a good thing because the CDN77 specializes in content delivery for high-quality and sophisticated content requirements. This complex content varies from video content for sites such as Udemy to video gaming sites such as ESL gaming and space agencies such as James Webb Space Telescope. Present with over 40 PoPs around the globe, they're your go-to CDN providers for huge content delivery needs.
CDN77 works for most websites, but their services are mostly tailored for video-focused and live-streaming platforms. Other CDN providers might be more reasonable if your needs are along these lines. However, its transparent pricing is a bonus, making it easier to compare it with other providers before choosing.
10. Imperva (Incapsula) 🔗
While other CDNs offer a wide variety of services, including content delivery and security solutions, Imperva (formerly Incapsula) has its roots in cybersecurity services. Security is their strong point, and you find that in the packages offered on their website.
With Siemens and Zillow among their customer base, Imperva counts over 44 PoPs worldwide. By using machine learning to cache dynamic pages fast, automated compression, and file minification, Imperva delivers a high-quality service. But since their emphasis is on security protection, the CDN service comes bundled into their security packages, and not separately.
11. BunnyCDN 🔗
With a 4.8/5 rating on Trustpilot, bunny.net services over a million websites worldwide, and it's ranked as the fastest CDN according to CDNPerf. Counting over 110 PoPs worldwide, they boast an average global latency no higher than 25 ms. Furthermore, it applies smart routing (to optimize performance during peak times) and image optimization and provides real-time analytics for you to monitor its performance.
The Slovenian startup has grown steadily while focusing on building features that give more power to developers. This includes developer-friendly tools such as scriptable DNSs and a set of its own fonts named Bunny Fonts. Regarding security measures, it offers GEO blocking, DDoS and hotlinking protection, and more.
🤔 You might be asking 🔗
How is Localazy language CDN different? 🔗
Localazy CDN is not designed to be used as a one size fits all solution for various project assets and multimedia content. Instead, Localazy CDN is a fully-managed delivery option specialized in the distribution of your localizable assets synced with your project in Localazy.
Localazy CDN works out of the box with your current architecture, and you don't need to pay extra attention to configuration, provisioning, scaling, invalidation, content uploads, etc.
Can Localazy connect to other CDN networks? 🔗
While you theoretically could connect your Localazy project with another CDN network (e.g., via the Localazy API), why would you? Considering the fact that Localazy CDN works out of the box and is a fully managed service, it can significantly reduce your overhead costs and TCO.
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is an estimation of the expenses associated with purchasing, deploying, using and retiring a product or piece of equipment. TCO, or actual cost, quantifies the cost of the purchase across the product's entire lifecycle.
✔️ Conclusion 🔗
We've presented you with a short list of CDNs that can help you deliver content and improve website performance by storing and distributing copies of your data across multiple servers in various locations around the globe. The right CDN decreases the loading speed of your website or app and increases resilience and protection against cyber attacks and high traffic.
Always select a CDN that offers DDoS protection, SSL certificates, and malware scanning, among other features, to keep your assets secure. However, when searching for the right CDN, remember the service areas and the nature of your assets. For instance, if you're building a multilingual site, our CDN will save you the headache of trying to deliver multilingual files because it's customized to do just that.
And it's a wrap. Is there any CDN missing in this article? Let us know in the comments! If you were looking for a CDN to expand your business capabilities, we hope you found your favorite in the list.
