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CDN Pricing
Here in this article, we will discuss the pricing for using Content Delivery Network. After this read, you will get to know what kinds of details should you be on the lookout for when vetting a CDN provider.
How is CDN usage cost calculated?
Usually, the CDN usage is calculated by estimated monthly bandwidth costs or by a pay-as-you-go model. However, our advice is to consider a CDN provider that is not just caching your content.
There are lots of cool features and add-ons available that not only optimize your usage but also decrease data transfer costs through things like image compression and smart transformation features.
Reliable CDN service can help you with DDoS protection, and ensure low latency while making sure your web application loads faster. All the solutions are often in one place, it’s just worth making sure that you get the best price-quality ratio on the market, especially for startups or emerging businesses.
CDN Pricing Variables
As with any other industry, the CDN world has its own pricing model but to sum up, it’s very popular among companies to take into account the following:
- Bandwidth or traffic
- Delivery destination (Europe, Asia, or North America may have different rates)
- HTTP vs. HTTPS traffic
- Live streaming
- Certificates (shared vs free vs custom)
In most cases, CDN charges by regions. So you need to remember that the closest edge locations will always give you the fastest speed and performance.
The delivery type, HTTP vs HTTPS requests, and traffic type (video, audio) will all affect the price of the CDN services as well.
When combining the CDN with the storage, you can also see below included in the pricing:
- Cloud Storage (GB)
- Push/Pull Zones
Another approach would be to pick a provider depending on your needs: is it dynamic e-commerce application, video streaming, or just static website with future scalability needs?
CDN Pricing Comparison
Paid plan comparison
In the beginning let’s just compare CDN pricing and pricing variables for some of the best CDN providers.
| Name | CDNs | Paid plan value | Variables |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Azure | Verizon, Akamai, Microsoft | pay-as-you-go model with no lowest rate. Here’s pricing calculator | CDN provider, static zone delivery, acceleration Data Transfers, type of support |
| Akamai | Akamai | individual agreement | Bit-per-second methodology, traffic volume, add-ons, etc. General billing information can be found here |
| Uploadcare | Akamai, Amazon CloudFront and KeyCDN | starts from $20 a month | Max upload size, storage (GB), traffic volume (GB), uploads quantity. You can find our pay-as-you-grow pricing here |
| Cloudflare | Cloudflare | starts from $20 a month | Max upload size, uptime, catche TTL expiry, support option, add-ons. Pricing overview |
| Amazon CloudFront | Amazon | custom, with no lowest required fee | location, HTTP/HTTPS traffic, data transfer (GB), add-ons. Link to AWS pricing calculator |
| StackPath | StackPath | starts from $10 a month | Bandwidth, number of DNS requests, number of monitored services |
Is there a free CDN?
The features of free CDN here are very limited, but it is a good way to get the first level of benefits - naming, the CDN itself.
CDN Performance
If you are working with an e-commerce company, you should consider a CDN that offers specific modules for it like: dynamic image optimization, dedicated CDN cache nodes, and anti-spam. The faster your website loads, the more chances for your business to succeed. Thus, if your website is slow, customers will leave it.
When it comes to content delivery network providers, there's no doubt that these services are often expensive but sometimes very essential for businesses.
If your CDN provider does not provide an easy-to-use tool for integration with your platform, you will have to write custom code that integrates the two systems. We recommend choosing a CDN partner that has built a reputation for providing quality services and supports integration using open source code, which can be found on GitHub. This approach will save you time and money.
Once you have integrated the CDN into your platform, it’s best to set up monitoring and analytics software so that you can measure traffic and track errors and other performance indicators after the launch of the updated system.