A content delivery network (CDN) caches files on servers throughout the world to make websites faster. Whether your visitors are from Europe, North America, Asia, or anywhere else, they will automatically be served content from the nearest location. Technology can be intimidating for those who are not familiar with it, and yes, it can be expensive, but don’t let that discourage you. CDNs aren’t just for large corporations. In less than five minutes, you can set up as many services as you need, and if you choose your plan carefully, it might even be free for you.
To help you speed up your website, we have compiled a list of the best image CDN hosting services along with their pros and cons.
1. Cloudflare – The best free CDN plan around with a ton of features
In the field of content delivery, Cloudflare is a highly popular American service that offers novice-friendly accessibility and expert-level functionality.
The setup is simple, and no coding is necessary. By updating your DNS nameservers to use Cloudflare, the service will automatically start caching content and serving it to visitors in their closest location. But there’s so much more. It can also protect you from hackers, detect and mitigate DDoS attacks, and block bots and spam. Optimizations of images can reduce file sizes by 35%, thereby improving speeds even further. A wide range of standards is supported, including IPv6, HTTP/2, and SPDY, and clever page rules can be used to manipulate traffic. There is a REST API available to developers, so they have full control over the service. Furthermore, Flan Scan, a lightweight vulnerability scanner is included as well.
It is totally free to test Cloudflare’s service, so you do not have to commit to anything. It has unlimited bandwidth and no annoying restrictions that try to force you to upgrade. An upgrade to the Pro plan costs $20 (£16) a month and adds image optimization rules, extra configuration options, and improved support. Cloudflare offers great performance whatever you choose. A benchmarking site ranks Cloudflare among the top five worldwide for HTTP request-response time, as of writing.
Pros.
- Capable free plan
- Lots of features
- Great performance.
Cons.
- None
2. Faslty – The heavyweight of the CDN world, highly configurable
CDN tricks from Fastly are used by some very large organizations, such as Spotify and Reddit, and the firm delivers impressive performance levels. According to report from CDNPerf’s rankings, it is the second-fastest CDN network in the UK, and worldwide speeds are mostly good, too. Fastly’s the greatest strength, though, is its ability to be customized according to your needs. In addition, there are diverse options for video caching and lots of low-level control for those who want to manipulate HTTP headers in order to customize how content is served. A single set of credentials allows you to log in to multiple Fastly accounts at once. A little knowledge is required to set up everything, and novices to the CDN world will likely be confused by all the options available. In terms of flexibility and configurability, it is priceless.
In terms of pricing, Fastly operates a pay-as-you-go model with a minimum charge of $50 (£37) per month. A $50 traffic test is also free.
Pros.
- Delivers fast speeds
- Hugely configurable
Cons.
- Can be tricky to set up
3. KeyCDN
A budget CDN with low traffic rates and free SSL. KeyCDN is an easy-to-use budget CDN that might be a good choice for first-time users. It couldn’t be easier to get started. Just provide your email address and you will be able to get 25GB to play with immediately without providing payment details. The well designed web dashboard enables quick setup of your first zone, and guides are available to help you integrate the service with WordPress and other platforms.
Additionally, KeyCDN fully supports IPv6.
More experienced users will appreciate the Origin Shield option, which lets you specify a KeyCDN server rather than the origin to serve updates, reducing your server load. You can manipulate headers, cache or strip cookies, or set up a robots.txt. After the service is running, a set of reporting tools makes it possible to watch CDN performance in near real-time. A few other features are available as well, such as Block Referrer, which blacklists domains that hotlink content, and Image Processing, which optimizes images. The main feature of KeyCDN is its low prices. The price of the bandwidth starts at $0.04 (£0.032) per gigabyte, less than half the price of some high-end competitors. A small amount of $4 (£3.2) a month is required for minimal usage, and a minimum payment of $49 (£38) is required. The company does not even try to monetize the extras, such as offering free shared SSL and custom Let’s encrypt SSL certificates.
Unsurprisingly, these low prices don’t get you cutting-edge performance, but you do get a lot of power for the money.
Pros.
- Very low prices
- Easy setup
Cons.
- Performance isn’t the best
Conclusion
Hopefully this article helped you choose the best CDN provider to speed up your WordPress site. If you have found this article, you must be looking for the best image CDNs (Content Delivery Networks). Not only will CDN services speed up your website but also, they optimize the images (compress and resize) and make it even faster.
Due to all these factors and features, we’ve selected these image CDN hosting providers that will enable your website to serve scaled images faster.
