Choosing CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, do you need it? Well, let's see.

1. Are you running a high traffic volume website and your users are distributed? Y/N

2. Is latency important for your users? Y/N

If you answer yes on both, then you should use CDN. Here is a list of items you should consider when choose a CDN

• Shield your origin
• Speed of purge cache
• API support on normal use and configuration
• Override path and cache behavior
• support multiple origin
• GeoIP and conditional based rewrite
• WAF
• Logfile stream to S3 or other services
• admin support multi factor authentication
• HTTP 2.0
• Customer support (yes, you will need it)
• apex domain support
• Deploy new config speed
• 3rd party integration
• Ignore query paramaters
• Community

I'm a long time CDN user, including some market leading vendors. Recently a migration to Fastly (varnish based solution) showed smaller players are not necessary slower.

To all friends out there, bias-free. Try out and see what's best for you!