Recommended CDN's?

Seems this is the new craze and people are saying how much faster it makes the sites load and how much load it takes off their servers. If you have used CDN's, where do you recommend?

I used the search and it seems like people were asking about it roughly a half year ago with barely any response. If you don't know what CDN's are, wiki/google it and please don't respond to this thread. I know more and more people are using them so hopefully this time we can get answers from people

 

I have personally used the Softlayer's CDN. It is not full featured yet, it should include couple of more uploading options like upload using API, though it is worthy to give a try.

 

Some Data Centers such as SoftLayer provide their own CDN which will make it easier to manage. Akamai is probably the biggest CDN but they are expensive.

 

Akamai is quite expensive but they have a quality network. Amazon providers CloudFront which is a CDN.

 

What do you guys think about maxcdn.com?

 

Best one in the industry is Akamai ..( kinda costly and difficult to buy directly unless you are big ),
I use MAXCDN , it's ok..go with them if your website visitors are mainly from US, they don't have any nodes in ASIA, and only 2 locations is EU ( NL and DE )..

 

I just went through a slew of CDN testing for my forums which serves nearly 25 million monthly page views. I considered CDN's to be a cheap solution for my images, css, and js serving needs.

My first experiment was Amazon CloudFront service. It works. It's a bit quircky to setup but it works well when it is. However they charge a per request fee. Once I calculated monthly costs for me it was more expensive than Akamai. I server many very small files per page including about 5 JS and CSS per page. So that was out.

Next I opened up an account with VPS.net as they resold Highwinds at about 5 cents a GB. It was unreliable and I had VPS.net change my balance from HWCDN to Akamai (15 cents per GB).

As of now I have not tested Akamai but one thing for sure. Not easy to setup. I'll get to it eventually so I can do a full review for everyone.

I did setup a MaxCDN account and I must say...it's my favorite so far. They have a great intro rate of 1GB for $40. Since I server many small files this is about 10 months CDN for me. It's half their normal rate of 9.9 cents per GB which is very reasonable.

Max CDN offers both push and pull zones. I had some issues with one push zone and content that was cached but overall good. I have 2 pull zones both working perfectly without any user complaints. The MaxCDN interface is easy to navigate and very intuitive. One thing is that admincp for maxcdn doesn't work in anything but Firefox...not even in IE. I reported this but they seemingly don't care. Not a big deal. I just open up Firefox instead of my normal Opera to access the CP.

For me personally prices for CDN are very reasonable in comparison to serving the content from my own servers which I'd not only have to pay for but manage and secure as well. CDN are scalable too. So once you have the account you just pay for it and if you're site get 10x bigger you should not have to do a single thing beyond paying the balance.

Oh one other thing. MaxCDN supports compression (gzip) of CSS ad JS files without any problems. Saves you a ton of bandwidth. I'm fairly certainly most others support compression but Amazon does not appear to. Make sure if you're using the CDN to serve content that can be compressed that the CDN supports it.

 

Which CDN is good if you are serving mostly international users?

 

Akamai would be a good choice for International but MaxCDN does have plenty of international nodes.

http://www.maxcdn.com/network.php

 

I used a CDN yesterday - its MAX CDN - very cheap - 1000GB for 35$ - and see now my site has a yslow score of grade 'A'.

 

Thanks guys, I've gone with MaxCDN and haven't had a problem with them yet so I'm quite happy (especially since they are much more affordable than most of the other sites I've looked at).

 

I have used SoftLayer, Voxel, Rackspace, Internap and a few others. All work well depending on your needs. I've also used various cloud services in conjunction with dedicated servers. Depending on your visitor's locations, this can work well. For example, I spun up 3 lighttpd servers for serving up static content. They gave me 2000GB/mo each and performance was good.

When looking for a CDN consider:

- Location of Nodes
- Cache update methods
- Storage methods

I like systems that use origin pull. With origin pull, you put all of your content on one or more source servers. This makes it easy to backup your content but still get the benefits of the CDN. Often, I setup a special domain that simply points to the main web server. This way you can avoid extra strorage fees.