CDN Service
The number of Internet users in the world has soared to 4.1 billion as of December 2018 and continues to increase, while the number of websites has grown to almost 2 billion. As more and more people spend time online using their web-enabled laptops, tablets, and smartphones, an economy of unlimited opportunities for everyone has emerged. Blogs and websites can now be leveraged to connect with customers anywhere in the world and make money. In order to drive traffic to your website, however, make sure that it is fast and responsive. Studies show that nearly 50 percent of visitors expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and that 40 percent will leave your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Furthermore, 79 percent of online shoppers will not return to a site that doesn’t load fast enough. Thus, a slow website is bad from a business perspective.
A content delivery network (CDN) can help improve your website’s speed by delivering your content to users the soonest time possible regardless of their geographical location or the type of device they use. A CDN service accelerates the delivery of user-requested resources such as HTML pages, stylesheets, javascript files, images, and videos by using techniques ranging from load balancing to minification and file compression. Major companies like Shopzilla, Amazon, Walmart, Firefox, Yahoo, and AutoAnything.com have experienced significant increases in revenue by making their websites load faster.
Aside from optimizing your website’s performance, a CDN can protect your data from DDoS attacks, ransomware, phishing, malware, cryptocurrency hijacking, and other cybersecurity threats by using various strategies such as SSL/TLS encryption.
Some of the top CDN providers that can make your website fast and secure are Cloudflare, KeyCDN, MetaCDN, Amazon CloudFront, CDN77, MaxCDN (now StackPath), Google Cloud CDN, Akamai, and BelugaCDN (https://www.belugacdn.com). The best free CDNs include Incapsula, Swarmify, jsDelivr, Photon by Jetpack, and Bootstrap CDN.
For content management systems such as WordPress, Swarmify, Cloudflare, Incapsula, and Photon by Jetpack are highly recommended. CDNs that offer free trials include KeyCDN, MaxCDN, RackSpace, Amazon CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN, Microsoft Azure CDN, Cloudinary, CDN77, and BelugaCDN. Any of these CDN services can also work seamlessly with hosting providers like GoDaddy.
Choosing the Best CDN Service
With so many CDNs in existence today, deciding which one is the best for your website is certainly not easy. It doesn’t help that a lot of them have hefty price tags, although the cost of bandwidth with a CDN is still generally cheaper than that with a traditional hosting provider. If you don’t have the budget or are not willing to pay for a CDN, you may opt for a free CDN. But if you need more bandwidth and want to enjoy the complete features of a CDN, you should go for a paid plan. In this case, here are some criteria to use when evaluating a CDN provider:
- Performance
A CDN is expected to accelerate your website or blog. Check whether the CDN service provider has the infrastructure to deliver your content to your users faster than before, on any device. Does it have the capability to reduce latency or minimize the number of hops? What is its average DNS server response time, or how fast will its edge servers process and deliver the content requested by a user?
Can the CDN provide network capacity on demand in case of sudden, unexpected spikes in traffic? If your website hosts tons of image or video files, does the CDN have the capability to optimize them so that they can load fast? These are just some of the questions you need to ask to assess whether a CDN can keep your website at peak performance at all times. - Security
Cyber criminals will always be lurking somewhere ready to pounce on your website and steal your precious data. Without a CDN, you are vulnerable to threats such as phishing, botnets, ransomware, DDoS and wiper attacks, data manipulation and destruction, spyware/malware, malvertising, etc. Look for a CDN provider that has a robust infrastructure to protect your website from any of these malicious activities; for example, SSL/TLS encryption. - Reliability
One of the important characteristics of a reliable content delivery network is its ability to keep your website up and running even when there is network congestion or hardware failure. A CDN should be able to deal with spikes in web traffic and prevent service interruption by expertly employing techniques such as load balancing and intelligent failover, or by maintaining servers across multiple data centers around the world. - Technical support
It is imperative for a CDN to have a team of customer support reps that are available 24/7 via phone and email and can solve problems with a quick ticket response time. They should have the expertise to answer your queries and must be proactive in resolving issues before they can disrupt your website. - Price
When it comes to prices, CDNs are not created equal. For a monthly bandwidth of 2,500 GB, for instance, MaxCDN charges $150, Google Cloud CDN $200, Amazon CloudFront $213, and Microsoft Azure CDN $218. You should gather pricing information and compare plans before hooking up with a CDN.
Conclusion
A fast website improves your chances of succeeding in an extremely competitive digital marketplace. You are going to lose potential customers if your web pages are slow to load. A CDN service provider such as BelugaCDN (https://www.belugacdn.com) can speed up your website without the high price tag associated with traditional CDN providers.
For $20 a month, your website will get traffic of 2,500 GB along with other features such as real-time analytics, custom SSL, API, secure token, unlimited cache purging, and responsive technical support. More importantly, BelugaCDN will increase your website’s load times by 20-40 percent thanks to its next-gen IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack network. BelugaCDN offers a 30-day, no-commitment free trial and won’t tie you to a long-term contract by using a pay-as-you-go billing scheme.
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