A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a global network of servers that delivers your web content from the geographically-closest server to every visitor.
In the past, CDNs have been too expensive for small businesses. But with new services like Akamai's emerging business program and Amazon's S3, EC2 and CloudFront products, they have become available for $100-$300 a month!
CloudFlare
Free CDN
CoralCDN
Free CDN - just add .nyud.net to any static file url you want served from the cdn
Fastest CDN benchmark
Discover which CDN provider or cloud provider provides you with the fastest download experience!
Edgecast CDN
Normally $400 / month agreement
- 500gb bandwidth
- 15gb storage
- advanced reporting
eg: $0.14 / gb, over half less than Akamai with similar performance, and easy to setup
- Change your domain's DNS to their servers
- They will download any file not already on their servers
Also cheaper than Amazon CloudFront.
- $300 a month for 2tb CDN bandwidth for global delivery
Contract
- Need a 1-year contract (monthly if you go through another company, like theplanet.com)
Free trial
- Take the free trial, and ask to test everything (like realtime reporting and top accessed files in advanced reports)
See
Integrates with softlayer.com, but need to ask Edgecast to work with them directly
Akamai CDN
See
Akamai offers the fastest and largest global CDN with 61,000 servers in 70 countries. Every person in the world is never more than 100 miles away from an Akamai server (with the exception of Antarctica) and 90% of all Internet users are just one hop away.
Hotmail uses Akamai, Facebook uses Akamai, and most small businesses dismissed Akamai as "too expensive". But with their new Emerging Business program, Akamai has now priced themselves competitively with other CDNs.
Akamai serves three kinds of content
- Media delivery, streaming
Can deliver the optimal bandwidth video stream
eg iPhone on 3G will get lower bandwidth stream, when you get to the office, give you a higher bandwidth stream - Site delivery, static HTML and files
Upload all your images, CSS and Javascript files to Akamai - Acceleration services for dynamic content, like PHP
Offers a content management platform, like for podcasts and WordPress
You specify the rules that identify what can come from Akamai
- Storage platform
Upload static files to Akamai - Self-hosted platform
You maintain your own servers, Akamai gets content from them on the very first request and caches it on their CDN
Rules determine which content to cache and for how long
To explore what it costs to have your site powered by Akamai, see
To learn more about CDNs, see the Wikipedia article
Amazon CDN
Amazon CloudFront is a CDN layer that sits on top of Amazon's other services, like S3 (simple storage solution) and EC2 (elastic computing).
To learn more about Amazon CloudFront, see
To learn more about Amazon S3, see
To learn more about Amazon EC2, see
Rackspace Cloud CDN
High cost
And
Mid cost