A Content Delivery Networks (CDN) is a service that you use to speed up your site and decrease its load time by a significant amount.
Thanks to the immense popularity and user friendliness of WordPress, integrating a CDN in your WordPress powered site is a piece of cake! In today’s article, we’re going to take a look at some of the popular free and premium CDN services for WordPress.
Perks of a Content Delivery Network:
Before we dive into the list, let’s take a quick look at the enormous benefits of using a CDN:
A faster site always better than a slower one and Google prefers the former. Speed is one of the factors based on which a site’s PageRank is calculated
A site that loads quickly improves the user’s experience, which is crucial for optimizing conversion rates.
When you use a CDN, your files aren’t served from your hosing server, but from a worldwide distributed network depending on the CDN provider you choose. This saves a lot of bandwidth on your actual hosting provider.
Now that you know how immensely beneficial a content delivery network is, let’s get this party started!
MaxCDN
Similar to the Genesis Framework, MaxCDN is the industry standard when it comes to WordPress CDN services. It’s very easy to setup and the prices are affordable. On December 2013, MaxCDN got a major makeover with a new design, new pricing plans and the merging of their parent company – NetDNA to MaxCDN Enterprise. MaxCDN is trusted by leading companies like The Next Web, StumbleUpon and Washington Post and managed WordPress hosting providers like WPEngine, Page.ly and ZippyKid.
Pros:
Integrating with WordPress is a very simple
Numerous coupons available
Great affiliate program to make some extra bucks
Phone, email and live chat support
RESTful API available for your apps
Cons:
Compared to other CDN providers, MaxCDN could be a bit pricey
Visit MaxCDN »
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Now this a company that’s everywhere. From online shopping across several continents, to providing unimaginably large cloud computational power to NASA and cancer research institutions and enabling high throughput networking and cloud computing services to the masses – Amazon is a name not unheard of.
When it comes to networking, Amazon provides two services (which are relevant to our list)
Amazon S3: This is Amazon’s online backup solution. You could backup a few bytes to 100s of petabytes into the cloud – starting at $0.095 per GB/month. Bandwidth is free upto 1GB/month, after which is costs 12 cents per GB per month. Good news is the price of bandwidth & storage is inversely proportional to the cost – higher the storage need, lesser is the cost per GB.
For those of you who’re looking to save a substantial amount of bandwidth and have a speedy site, without having to pay for a proper CDN – Amazon S3 is your best bet. If your visitors are mostly from the United States, your site would load pretty darn fast!
Amazon CloudFront: This is the proper CDN service from Amazon. CloudFront is one of the most popular (and technically advanced) CDN providers – with a vast network of delivery nodes. Off the top of my head, 9GAG, Amazon.com and IMDb – all use Amazon CloudFront.
The pricing strategy of CloudFront is based on location and traffic demand. Bandwidth is usually cheaper when the data transfer is within the continent. There’s no minimum fee – you pay for what you actually you. If you’d like to get an estimate, you could try out their Monthly Bandwidth Calculator. What’s awesome is you can try out the full CDN experience for free, thanks to Amazon’s free usage quota. However, you’ll need a Credit Card before you can deploy your CDN. You won’t be charged if you remain within the free bandwidth tier.
Visit Amazon AWS »
RackSpace Cloud Files
RackSpace is a premier hosting company, best known for their dedicated servers. Backed up by the industry leading Akamai CDN network (Facebook and EA use Akamai’s network for starters) – RackSpace is a good choice for a pay-as-you-go WordPress CDN service. The price is 18c/GB for CDN and 10c/GB for storage. They also have a nifty WordPress setup guide, in case you’re interested.
Visit RackSpace »
CacheFly
They are the “go-to folks” when absolute speed is your priority. There are a lot of CDN services but few are as blazing fast as CacheFly’s globally distributed network. They offer a 10MB static speed test file, which you can download from different locations to try their speed. CacheFly is trusted by Adobe, Microsoft, LG, p&g and other notable brands.
Pros:
Insanely fast. CDNs are meant to be fast, but these folks take it to a whole new level
Globally distributed network of 45 POPs across the seven continents
Variety of content distribution services including video, IPTV, podcast, games, etc.
Cons:
Expensive – plans start at $0.37 per GB, at 250 GB per month
Targeted towards high traffic websites
Visit CacheFly »
CloudLayer
CloudLayer is the CDN counterpart of a well-known dedicated hosting provider based in the US – SoftLayer, whose parent company is IBM. Powered by over 24 nodes, CloudLayer provides high speed, low latency content delivery to the end user. Staring at 12c/GB, the service is coupled with email and phone support.
Pros:
Effective, pay-as-you-go or monthly pricing model
Competitive cost per GB – 12 cents/GB i.e. $122.88 USD per TB
Uniform pricing – no bandwidth segregation based on request location
Cons:
Relatively more expensive US/EU bandwidth as compared to CDN77
No free CDN storage included like in CDN77 (50GB free CDN storage)
Visit CloudLayer »
CDN77
CDN77 is powered by 65+ globally distributed POP locations. Pricing is based in order of terabytes – $49 USD/mo for 1TB of high speed bandwidth, including a 14 day free trial and a price calculator to estimate your requirements.
Pros:
Competitive pricing models including pay-as-you-go starting at $49/TB
Trail period does not require a credit card
Cons:
Expensive bandwidth in the Asia Pacific region - more than double the cost of the US/EU region
Visit CDN77 »
CloudFlare
If you’ve been using WordPress for a while now, I’m fairly certain that you’ve heard of CloudFlare. Operating for over 16 years, CloudFlare has emerged as the “go-to website” for free CDN and inbound traffic filtering service for enhanced security. Strangely though, CloudFlare does not have a bandwidth based pricing policy, but a flat-rate plan starting at $20/month, per domain. CloudFlare also provides real-time protection against DDoS attacks, custom site analytics and integration with an increasing number of web applications.
Visit CloudFlare »
CDN.net
For those of you who are new to the CDN business and/or would like to carry out some experiments first, this is the perfect choice for you. CDN.net offers a full terabyte (1024 GB) of CDN bandwidth – absolutely free, for a period of 30 days. You can carry out all the tests you want – without spending a dime!
Pros:
Ability to test the CDN in a high traffic website for 30 days, thanks to the generous 1 GB bandwidth
No credit card required during the evaluation period
Competitive location based pricing including the pay-as-you-go and enterprise model
Variety of geo-targetted locations
Recurring 15% commission on every referral earned for the first year
Visit CDN.net »
jsDeliver
jsDeliver is a free public CDN which hosts popular JavaScript files like jPlayer and Lightbox. These JS files are used in numerous WordPress themes and chances are, if you’ve purchased a fancy theme from ThemeForest, a lot of extra JS files are used.
With the help of their WordPress plugin, you can make the JavaScript files to be servced from the free CDN network, instead of serving it from your site. This dramatically improves the site’s loading time, and gives you the benefit of a CDN powered website without actually integrating/implementing one.
Visit jsDeliver »
Photon in Jetpack
Jetpack is one of those plugins which fall under the “must-activate” category in most WordPress sites. It has tons of useful modules the most interesting one being “Photon”. Once activated, all your site’s images are uploaded to WordPress.com’s servers (which runs on the EdgeCast network). When someone visits your site, the images are served from WordPress.com’s servers – thereby proving you with an absolutely free CDN service.
Download JetPack »
Free Image Hosts & Cloud File Storage
If your site is heavy on images or you have a lot of stuff to offer as downloads – say for example high-res images, ZIP files, PPTs and eBooks, uploading them to your hosting provider would consume a lot of disk space and bandwidth. The smart thing to do here is use the free image hosting services to display your photos and use file sharing services to distribute your content. Granted, your files won’t be loading really fast, but the whole deal is free. Following are a couple of services I recommend:
Image Hosting:
imgur
Photobucket
Flickr
File Hosting:
Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, etc.
MediaFire (has download count and custom analytics)
Visit Dropbox »
SwarmCDN
SwarmCDN is a new peer-to-peer based content delivery network that offers 100 GB of bandwidth in their free plan. Commercially, they offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model which is good for websites with medium traffic.
Visit Swarmcdn »
CoralCDN
CoralCDN is another peer-to-peer based CDN which was developed at MIT. It’s absolutely free of cost, and requires almost zero configuration. All you have to do is append “.nyud.net” to the file’s URL you’re trying to download – and voila – you’ll get your data! I haven’t been able to figure out how this works even today. So if you’re reading this and happened to be a P2P expert, please shed some light on this topic!
Visit CoralCDN »
Conclusion
Today we’ve covered some of the best free and premium content delivery networks available for WordPress. I’d like to conclude this article with a bit of advice:
If you’re serious about integrating a premium CDN all by yourself, MaxCDN wis your best choice.
If you’re looking for A/B testing, get hold of a trial CDN – like CDN.net. You get more than enough bandwidth.
If you run a simple blog with medium traffic but incur grater bandwidth consumption due to more downloads, then you might want to consider MediaFire
So, are you using a CDN? If so, then which one is it and what’s your monthly bandwidth consumption? And as always, we look forward to your valuable feedback!
The post The Best Free and Premium CDNs for WordPress is written by Sourav and appeared first on WPKube.