What is CDN
A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers.
The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. CDNs came into existence in the late 1990s as a means for alleviating the performance bottlenecks of the Internet as the Internet was starting to become a mission-critical medium for people and enterprises.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company, founded in 2010. It primarily acts as a reverse proxy between a website’s visitor and the Cloudflare customer’s hosting provider. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California.
The Best Cloudflare CDN Alternatives & Competitors
Cloudflare CDN is not the only option for Content Delivery Network (CDN) Software. Explore other competing options and alternatives. Other important factors to consider when researching alternatives to Cloudflare CDN include reliability and ease of use.
What is better than Cloudflare?
We have compiled a list of solutions that reviewers voted as the best overall alternatives and competitors to Cloudflare CDN, including Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, and Varnish Software.
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network operated by Amazon Web Services. Content delivery networks provide a globally-distributed network of proxy servers that cache content, such as web videos or other bulky media, more locally to consumers, thus improving access speed for downloading the content.
What is Amazon CloudFront used for?
Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as . html, . css, . js, and image files, to your users.
What type of service is Amazon CloudFront?
content delivery network (CDN) service
Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience.
Fastly
Fastly is an American cloud computing services provider. It describes its network as an edge cloud platform, which is designed to help developers extend their core cloud infrastructure to the edge of the network, closer to users.
What is Fastly used for?
Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN) company that helps users view digital content more quickly. The company also provides security, video delivery, and so-called edge computing services.
What runs on Fastly?
According to various media outlets, businesses that have signed on to use Fastly services include the New York Times, the Financial Times, Shopify, Spotify, Slack, Github, TikTok, and Ticketmaster.
Is Fastly like AWS?
Fastly’s edge cloud is a globally distributed, programmable platform designed to take advantage of the modern internet and complement major cloud providers like AWS. Regardless of where customers’ applications operate, Fastly can protect them at scale without sacrificing security for performance.
Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly
What are the differences?
Developers describe Amazon CloudFront as “Content delivery with low latency and high data transfer speeds”. Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. On the other hand, Fastly is detailed as “We’re redefining content delivery”.
Fastly’s real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.
Microsoft Azure CD
Azure is a world-class cloud for hosting virtual machines running Windows or Linux. Whether you use ASP.NET, Java, Node. js, or PHP to develop applications, you’ll need a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline to push changes to these virtual machines automatically.
What is CD in Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps Starter presents a simplified process for creating a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline to Azure. You can bring your existing code and Git repo, or you can select a sample application.
Is Azure a CI CD tool?
Implement CI/CD to continuously build, test, and deploy to any platform and any cloud.
Varnish
Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites as well as APIs. In contrast to other web accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a client-side cache, or Apache and nginx, which are primarily origin servers, Varnish was designed as an HTTP accelerator.
What is Varnish server used for?
Varnish is a program that can increase the speed of a Web site while simultaneously reducing the load on the Web server. “Varnish is a “Web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy” – according to Varnish’s official website.
Is Varnish Cache free?
Varnish Cache is an open source project written in C. The fact that it’s open source means the code is also available online and the use of Varnish is free of charge. Varnish Cache is maintained by an active community, led by Poul-Henning Kamp.
Is varnish a proxy?
Varnish Cache is a powerful, open source HTTP engine/reverse HTTP proxy that can speed up a website by up to 1000 percent by doing exactly what its name implies: caching (or storing) a copy of a webpage the first time a user visits.
Imperva App Protect
Imperva is the cybersecurity leader whose mission is to protect data and all paths to it.
What is Imperva Application Security?
Imperva Application Security provides powerful DDoS Protection and Advanced Bot Protection to eliminate attacks long before malicious traffic even has a chance to reach a customer’s website.
How much does Imperva WAF cost?
The on-premises WAF is priced per appliance and starts at $10,000. Enterprise customers typically buy four or five physical or virtual appliances and spend anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000.
KeyCDN
KeyCDN is a global content delivery network whose mission is to develop and engineer a content delivery solution that is accessible to as many people as possible. They work with various peering partners to keep the costs low which in turn allow them to provide very competitive prices.
They engineered their own architecture and the infrastructure is fully owned by KeyCDN. All POPs are located in premium SSAE 16-compliant data centers (such as Equinix, Softlayer, and Digital Realty), running on 100% SSD-optimized servers and Nginx for lower latency.
Is KeyCDN free?
The first 3 Zones are included for free. Each additional Zone is $1 per month. Push Zones allow content to be directly transferred to our multi-redundant and high performance storage cluster. Once stored content is pulled, cached, and delivered by our network edge servers.
How can I test my CDN performance?
Use your own headers for your CDN performance check
Test any CDN by adding your own request headers. Open the Add request headers and choose a CDN provider from our list to use the default keys or define your own using the request header key and value. Click Test now and analyze the results.
Netlify
Netlify is a San Francisco–based cloud computing company that offers hosting and serverless backend services for web applications and static websites.
What is Netlify used for?
Netlify is a web developer platform that multiplies productivity. By unifying the elements of the modern decoupled web, from local development to advanced edge logic, Netlify enables a 10x faster path to much more performant, secure, and scalable websites and apps.
Is Netlify hosting free?
One of the great advantages of deploying your Gatsby website through Netlify is free hosting. I think it’s absolutely wonderful. Today I’ll teach you how to deploy your own Gatsby website to Netlify and have that free hosting too.
Is Netlify good for web hosting?
Netlify makes it super easy for developers to host websites, in a way that is scalable and secure. Netlify leverages serverless functions and deployment to deliver sites faster than other configurations. Through Jamstack architecture, the infrastructure is suited for both developers and content editors.
Akamai
Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American content delivery network (CDN), a cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services.
Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform is one of the world’s largest distributed computing platforms. The company operates a network of servers around the world and rents out capacity on these servers to customers who want their websites to work faster by distributing content from locations near the user. When a user navigates to the URL of an Akamai customer, their browser is directed by Akamai’s domain name system to a proximal edge server that can serve the requested content.
What is Akamai used for?
Akamai delivers web content over its Intelligent Platform by transparently mirroring elements such as HTML, CSS, software downloads, and media objects from customers’ servers. The Akamai server is automatically chosen depending on the type of content and the user’s network location.
Does Microsoft use Akamai?
By becoming an Akamai customer, Microsoft joins the list of leading Web companies that rely on Akamai for high-performance, reliable delivery of content to their users.
Cloudflare competitors include Zscaler, Akamai, Fastly, Instart and MaxCDN.
Both Fastly and Cloudflare offer extensive security features, however, Cloudflare wins out on this aspect because it received the highest possible scores in various security criteria.
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