5 Best CDN Providers 2021 - The Best Content Delivery Networks

CDN is the acronym of content delivery network. Just as the name suggests, it is used to deliver the content of your website to your visitors with the fastest speed and the highest security. Generally, if your readers want to view your webpages, their access requests will be sent to your web server. Once the server receives the requests, it will send all the desired information back to the requesting machine (E.G. you readers’ computers), including HTML, images, multimedia files and JavaScript files.

However, the physical distance will affect the page loading and file downloading speed to the largest extent, after all, your content need to travel a long time to be viewed by your readers if their geographical locations are far from your web server. In this circumstance, you need a CDN to speed up your website.

All of the CDN providers have a network of servers in strategic locations around the world, and copy your website content on each of these servers. Therefore, when people visit your site, they will be delivered your content from a nearby server, increasing the speed dramatically.

Now, you have known that CDN is useful to grow your website, and here is the question: which is the best CDN provider? After all, there are so many options on the web with different features, prices, and guarantees. But don’t worry. We have given you a list of important criteria you need to consider when choosing the CDN.

• The CDN you choose need to have an international reach, placing the servers at the most strategic locations.
• It should be able to provide you with the solid statistics showing how and when your visitors access your content.
• If your website contains private and sensitive information, then you need to make sure that the CDN offers encoding for secure content transferring.
• If your website always has a large number of readers trying to view your content at the same time, or if your site is a media-rich one, then you’d better choose a CDN which can supply the enough bandwidth you need.
• Make sure the CDN supports the most advanced technology as the delivery methods, such as HTTP progressive downloads, Flash streaming, Windows Media streaming, and Quicktime or Real Media streaming, etc.

If you have no time and every to choose a right CDN provider by yourself, then simply check out this list of top 5 CDN, which have been carefully selected by our specialized editors.

Top 5 CDN Providers

• Akamai
  Website: http://www.akamai.com/

  Akamai is the leading CDN provider, which helps webmasters maintain a fast webpage loading by distributing content from locations close to the readers. It delivers excellent website performance for highly interactive content, including HTML, CSS, audio, graphics, animation, and video by transparently mirroring content. Besides, it delivers secure online date transfer through SSL-content protection, thus reducing the risk of load-based online attacks. At present, it is responsible for serving between 15% – 20% of all web traffic, and used by some popular website like MTV Networks, MySpace, and the Scripps News Networks.

  

• Max CDN
  Website: https://www.maxcdn.com/

  Max CDN aims at improving the performance of a website, speeding up the page loading speed, reducing bandwidth usage, and increasing SEO rankings. It has already been trusted by more than 13,000 businesses including WP Engine, Mobify, TNW, and DISQUS. To offer the fastest speeds possible, Max CDN build a smarter network than many other CDN providers, with strategically selected data centers offering optimal speeds and lowest latency. Besides, in order to save on DNS lookups, this company utilizes Anycast DNS.

  

• Amazon CloudFront
  Website: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

  The Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with all the Amazon Web Services available, offering a comprehensive CDN service that enables customers to deliver content to their visitors quickly and safely, regardless of the physical distance and data limits. It will automatically route requests to the servers nearest to site visitors, thus ensure the highest levels of security and speed. Besides, the interface of CloudFront is incredibly simple and easy to use, with which customers can customers store files on servers, create a register of these servers, and use the distribution’s domain name in all web sites effortlessly.

  

• CloudFlare CDN
  Website: https://www.cloudflare.com/

  CloudFlare offers highly reliable CDN service with comprehensive global coverage. It has 23 points of presence across Europe, Asia, North America and Australia, reducing hops and lowering latency to the largest extent. Besides, its developing team builds their hardware from the ground up, choose the hardware components down to the chip level, run their own networks, and make the decision of choosing most strategic server locations to ensure the fastest network connections. Besides, CloudFlare also utilizes an exclusive technology known as Anycast, which routes the accessing requests to the nearest data center automatically.

  

• CDNetworks
  Website: http://www.cdnetworks.com/

  CDNetworks offers a secure, reliable, scalable and high performing content delivery network service, leveraging the power of Global Cloud Acceleration technology. It is a multinational CDN with expertise and infrastructure in China, Russia and many other emerging markets. As estimated, it has accelerated more than 17,500 global websites and cloud services over 140 points of presence (PoPs).