A Content Delivery Network (CDN) serves as a powerful tool for accelerating the transfer of assets necessary for a website's content. By utilizing an interconnected network of servers strategically distributed across various locations, a CDN significantly enhances website performance, particularly for data-intensive applications.
What Are the Benefits of Using CDN?
The advantages of employing a CDN are manifold and pivotal for companies seeking to optimize their online presence:
Enhanced Website Performance: Through the dispersion of content across multiple servers, a CDN ensures faster delivery to end-users, minimizing latency and enhancing the overall user experience. This enables websites to handle high volumes of traffic without sacrificing loading speed or responsiveness.
Scalability and Load Balancing: CDNs play a crucial role in supporting websites with a large user base. By offloading content delivery from the application server, a CDN can efficiently distribute the load across its server network, reducing network congestion and mitigating the risk of website performance degradation or crashes.
Reduced Bounce Rate: The swiftness of content delivery facilitated by a reliable CDN reduces the likelihood of visitors leaving a site prematurely due to slow loading times. As a result, bounce rates decrease, contributing to improved user engagement and retention.
Cost-Effective Bandwidth Management: CDNs employ caching and other optimization techniques to minimize the amount of data transmitted between servers and end-users. This intelligent handling of content reduces bandwidth consumption and, consequently, lowers bandwidth costs for website operators.
Strengthened Website Security: A robust CDN acts as a defense against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. By identifying and blocking malicious traffic, the CDN shields the website's infrastructure from overload, ensuring the site remains accessible to legitimate users during such attacks.
A CDN offers a multitude of benefits, including accelerated content delivery, efficient load distribution, reduced bounce rates, cost savings on bandwidth, and bolstered security against cyber threats like DDoS attacks. As a result, companies that rely on a website CDN provider can enjoy a more robust and reliable online presence, ultimately leading to improved user satisfaction and business success.
Listed below are the top 5 best content delivery networks in 2023:
1 bunny.net
Overview
Since its founding in 2014, bunny.net has been helping companies and developers build a faster, safer, and more reliable internet. It has powered over a million websites and delivered over 650 billion monthly requests. With its website CDN, it ensures a fast loading time of an estimated 0.7 seconds. Companies can leverage it to minimize latency, maximize performance, and reduce the bounce rate of website visitors.
Features
The website CDN platform of bunny.net is called Bunny CDN. It offers a direct line to the fastest networks in the world. It has a network capacity of 80 Tbps (Terabytes per second), an average global latency of 26 ms, and 114 global Points of Presence (PoPs). All these work together for fast data transmission.
It also offers protection from DDoS by employing safety measures to ensure consistent uptime and prevent website crashes from fake traffic. With SafeHop, the Bunny CDN enables easy configuration of timeouts, delays, and request retries to reduce origin errors.
Bunny CDN also offers real-time monitoring and log forwarding, allowing users to gain insights into their traffic and visibility into their content to make informed decisions based on relevant data. It's also capable of instant cache purging to keep a website's content up to date.
In addition, users can freely customize the rules of the website CDN platform to control the delivery, security, and routing of content. At an affordable price, companies can leverage Bunny CDN for its enterprise-grade performance with real-time monitoring, perma-caching, and DDoS protection.
2 Filestack
(Photo : Screenshot from Filestack website)
Overview
Filestack Deliver is the website CDN tool of Filestack. It is fully optimized and secure, ensuring fast file delivery across multiple devices regardless of the platform. There's no limit to its file size capacity. Users can access any audio, video, image, or document without compromising quality.
As a company, Filestack has a scalable infrastructure that powers billions of data transmissions every month. It ensures the reliable performance of websites and applications for users anywhere in the world.
Features
Filestack contains many features for a website CDN. Powered with Fastly CDN, each file uploaded through the File Picker generates a unique CDN URL, ensuring fast content delivery. The URLs are cached, which ensures fast delivery of the file. The cached copy of the URL stays live for 30 days and is only re-cached upon request from the user. By caching, Filestack assists companies in improving the speed and performance of their websites.
Moreover, Filestack can quickly produce images generated for all screens, including desktops, tablets, or mobile devices. It also offers file URL customization, enabling users to personalize their file URL through the Custom CNAME feature. Also, it contains a premium feature called storage aliases, enabling integration with other cloud storage providers.
Filestack can keep applications safe with its security policies and block unauthorized requests from unapproved domains that intend to steal API keys or files from secure websites. With its user-friendly document previews, Filestack offers a simple way to access content before it gets delivered through the website CDN.
Overall, companies can leverage Filestack for its straightforward solutions in content delivery.
3 Fastly
Overview
Fastly focuses its efforts on strategically placing fewer yet more powerful PoPs worldwide along with its Tier 1 solid-state-drive-powered servers, enabling them to serve more from caching content. The platform has an updated global capacity of 265Tbps and a mean purge time of 150ms, enabling fast transmissions of data around the world.
The fast transmissions are evident in its live cache hit ratio, hit time, and bandwidth displayed on its site, proving its capability as a platform for website CDN. As a company, it aims to build a better internet. With its powerful cloud CDNs, Fastly empowers developers to create, secure, and deliver websites and applications close to the users for an improved digital experience.
Features
Fastly offers everything a company needs from a modern CDN. It's scalable, secure, and offers full visibility and programmable control. With real-time visibility, Fastly offers insights into traffic trends, performance, potential problems, and threats. These insights become an important resource for improving website performance or troubleshooting connectivity problems.
Fastly also enables logging of files into a logging provider, so users can understand how customers are engaging with the website or application of a company. It also offers support for DevOps. Fastly can seamlessly integrate into existing workflows, which enables multiple deployment or feature enhancements of applications.
The CDN of Fastly is fully configurable, enabling users to change website content quickly, even event-driven content. With its full-featured API, anyone can instantly purge outdated content, clear cache, or turn on new features.
Fastly also allows customization of caching rules, enabling users to upload them to its PoPs and activate or deactivate them even without software proficiency. Fastly is the ideal choice for a website CDN with real-time visibility.
4 Sirv
Overview
Sirv focuses on image CDN because the company wants to highlight that 60% of all web traffic comes from images that offer a huge opportunity for all websites and apps. As an image processing platform, Sirv simplifies image management for fast production and delivery of images worldwide.
Features
With 24 strategically placed servers, the CDN of Sirv can fetch and deliver images quickly. It can return cached images in just a millisecond. It can also generate images at 0.15 seconds, enabling users to request new ones at any size or variation as fast as possible. With an accelerated loading speed, search engines can recognize company websites, potentially improving ranking in search results.
For image optimization, Sirv features a 360-degree image viewer, which is a way to attract leads for companies looking to increase their sales by using image CDN. Sirv can also automatically detect a user's screen size and generate images compatible with the device.
With its deep zoom feature, companies can highlight product details to immerse users, which lengthens their time spent on site. As an image processing platform, Sirv offers huge image support. It can automatically optimize large-size images and deliver the best resolution for the website visitor.
To ensure high-quality web content, Sirv can deliver images in WebP format, the superior file format to display high-quality images. If it's unsupported by the website, Sirv can easily convert the image into JPEG or PNG. Sirv also enables collaboration directly on its platform. With shared folders and image enhancement automation, it's one of the easiest-to-use platforms for image CDN.
5 Uploadcare
Overview
As a tech company, Uploadcare provides valuable services to its customers by enhancing the performance and UX of websites and apps. They offer innovative content delivery solutions and cutting-edge algorithms that cater to businesses of all sizes. As a versatile platform, Uploadcare provides a comprehensive set of features for uploading, managing, storing, processing, and securely delivering files to the users all around the world.
Customers value Uploadcare for its user-friendly interface, great documentation, and cost-effectiveness, as it not only eliminates the need for complex backend coding or the installation of image processing libraries but is also stack agnostic and offers customization to fit any business needs.This enables companies to upload and store files securely, facilitating secure sharing for businesses accepting UGC like marketplaces, print businesses or even healthcare providers.
One of the standout features of Uploadcare is its ability to transform images on the fly and deliver them at lightning speed through its image CDN. This results in fast loading times and improved uptime, providing visitors with a smooth user experience when browsing sites that use Uploadcare services.
Uploadcare's CDN consists of a vast network of over 325,000 nodes spread through 135 countries. Content is efficiently routed through the closest nodes to users, ensuring low latency and quick transfer times. The extensive node count also reflects the company's collaboration with multiple website CDN providers, expanding its global reach and reducing the likelihood of major service disruptions.
Features
Traditionally, CDNs operate by copying and caching functions. However, Uploadcare stands out by enabling various dynamic image manipulations. Listed below are its key features:
On-the-fly Image Transformations
The Uploadcare platform allows users to perform a wide range of image transformations instantly. Users can access file information and customize file delivery behavior through URL customization. Image CDN features include resizing, cropping, rotation, remove bg, overlays, watermarks, effects, and smart AI-detection-based transformations. The platform supports various formats, including standard ones like PNG, GIF, JPEG, and newer formats like HEIC, WebP, and AVIF.
(Photo : Screenshot from Uploadcare website)
Image Optimization
Uploadcare's image CDN offers image optimization capabilities, enabling users to scale and compress images without compromising their quality on websites or applications. The platform utilizes its own Pillow-SIMD algorithm to ensure fast and efficient image compression and resizing. Optimization options include file conversions, quality adjustments, smart compression, and optimization for high-pixel density ratios.
CDN Settings
Uploadcare provides customizable CDN settings, allowing users to tailor the CDN CNAME for their company, optimize cache duration, and enhance privacy by blocking search engines from indexing website content.
Proxy
The Proxy feature facilitates the automatic retrieval and delivery of remote files to a new location via the website CDN. Users can specify domain names authorized to host remote files, and the Proxy system recognizes and blocks delivery from unauthorized domains. Additionally, users can edit their Proxy Endpoint to serve files from a custom domain name.
Signed URLs
Users can exercise direct control over file access through signed URLs. This feature instructs Uploadcare CDN nodes to limit access to authorized clients, enhancing security for personal, medical, and other sensitive data frequently stored on websites.
Conclusion
Overall, it's worth investing in the best content delivery networks of 2023. Companies can leverage the fast delivery, load balancing, website security, and the improvement in content quality they can provide. While some providers have more servers than others, each of them are equally capable to provide a seamless web experience.
