Affordable CDN Roundup: KeyCDN, BunnyCDN and BelugaCDN vs. Amazon Cloudfront

1. Quick, what is CDN and why?

Coca Cola HQ is in Atlanta, GA.

My psychic ability, as detained by S.H.E.I.L.D, foresees a $10 bet that there is a slim chance some dedicated, single guy in the middle of nowhere willing to pack his stuffs and drive his dog a few hundreds milles down the road just to pick up a pack of these authentic soda bottles at the Coca Cola Headquarters.

Well make that $100, because I know there could be a Cat 6 storm coming and people would refuse to leave their couch for the shelter 2 miles away.

So what should they do?! Don’t panic! Hear this out…

First we stop by the McDonald down the street, then pull in the drive-through and politely ask the cashier for 5 large cokes and 7 glutten-free big macs. Don’t forget the diet fries on the sides for a complete control of local hunger. Everybody’s now happy. Great advice right? what I can say!

Just kidding, who would order that many hypocritical burgers anyway? *Let me bleach these receipts really quick*. But you have an idea.

Content Delivery Network also known as CDN, acts like a local distributor. It helps your online visitors receive the images, css stylesheet files and other medias from your website a lot faster the same way you were able to buy your favorite Coke at the nearest fastfood restaurants or local convenience stores instead of being that dude.

CDN provider simply caches and delivers these files from their nearest location to the viewer –called Point of Presence, long for POP– so the browser doesn’t have to get these content all the way from your website’s server location at a god-know-where warehouse.

Still don’t get it? I’m either a ninja with questionable way of delivering education, or you’re trolling me. To help you visualize the concept better, take a quick look at BelugaCDN‘s presentation below.

But here is the real question.

Is this really worth all the trouble to integrate a CDN to your website, which eventually costs more money and time? eg. Amazon Cloudfront could cost an upward of $50/mo on a high volume website. There were months I got billed for $78/mo! That’s about 312 bananas.

Fortunately, here are a few things to answer all of the above concerns. Those who plan to or is currently running an eCommerce and Dropshipping sites might want to pay close attention to the third link.

• Why Decreasing Page Load Time Can Drastically Increase Conversions @ kissmetrics
• Google Rank Website On Loading Time of the Page @ shoutmeloud
• How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion In Sales @ fastcompany

In short, Google loves fast websites and sends them more traffic. Visitors love fast websites and become more comfortable to spend many money there. According to kissmetrics, 40% visitors abandon page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load! –Geez, youngsters these days gotta have more patience. Back in my time we waited 5 minutes to download a pixelated photo of an actress. If you know what I mean.

Now CDN is not the biggest factor that could improve page speed. A fine-tuned, well optimized site with proper page cache will load under 3-second mark without breaking a sweat –that’s not gonna to happen on a shared host by the way.

However, shared host or not there is always a limited number of concurrent connections that can possibly get established between your browser and your website’s host at any time. Meaning there will be a maximum of 4-8 files in queue –including media and css– will be downloaded simultaneously from one server. Plus, on top of that is the long distance of communication for these packets which easily further increases wait time; not to mention the random lag or technical issues along the way.

In order to get to a load time of 2 seconds or below –which in the above case was a new 1.6 billion dollars of sales for Amazon– all the extra photos, videos and styles must be on a CDN. These servers could deliver them faster and more efficient because they are close to the visitor’s physical location; doing that also reduces bandwidth and off-loads unnecessary stress on your main server as well.

As you can see, though CDN is not the biggest factor, it’s one of the most important factors that could help speeding up the render of your site drastically. At the end of the day, it also indirectly increases your website’s presence on the Internet.

The Cost, Tiffany! The Cost!

My apology if I caught you off guard with the Cloudfront bill @ $70 a month above. It surprised the tacos out of me too.

But no worries, this article is part of the series Poor Man Fast Website (my name is not Tiffany). That’s why I put on my adventure hat and seek another CDN provider that could be worth our dough.

I have found a few reliable ones that raised above the average yet remain extremly affordable for webmasters like us. I’m going to put them in a cage and see how they spar with each other. We will be looking at the speed, ease of setup, feature-wise and of course, pricing of these CDN providers.

Features

My car saleman always tells me –don’t sell your customer features, sell them the benefits, the experience, Johnny.

Though I’m not Johnny, I definitely agree with that statement to an extent. But I’m not a car saleman, either; so in this case I will list all of the features of these CDN providers support and carefully explain to you what they are and what they do. Hopefully it’s not gonna bore you, but you’re not my customer so I don’t know.

The more exciting parts come after, though I think these features are quite important to know today or in the future. Especially when you are out and about shopping for a CDN for your multimillion-dollar website one day.

Let’s take a look at some of the keynotes from the table above.

First and most importantly, two of these 4 CDN providers are obviously from the animal kingdom, no doubt. I gotta say that because in the web hosting world, there is one Hostgator and it sucks; I’m not aware of any others. But we have both a bunny and a whale here! Such joyfulness! Remind me of this little guy:

Ok, that off my chest, let’s dive a little deeper.

Location & Price

Amazon Cloudfront is the most expensive CDN due to its vast network of available Points of Presence around the globe. KeyCDN is in for the second place while BunnyCDN and BelugaCDN are tied for third, in term of cost of service. All three do not seem to have as many server locations as Amazon Cloudfront, but they are more than sufficient for website hosted in the U.S serving North Americans.

If you are so determined for a speedy CDN provider with locations in many corners of the world but don’t want to pay a lot, KeyCDN and BelugaCDN are the great choices.

When it’s time to show your wallet –like when you walk in Costco and the door guy really wanna see you waving your stash, signaling that you’re ready to spend– KeyCDN is the toughest one to deal with because they really want your money.

KeyCDN requires you to deposit at least $49, as prepaid fund now to pay for the future bills until it runs out; though the cost per GB is only $0.04 which is half of what Amazon Cloudfront asks for.

Meanwhile, BelugaCDN and BunnyCDN are totally laid back. Both only require you to deposit a minimum of $5 upfront for service.

Amazon Cloudfront other hand are more of a pay-as-you-go type where you wheel in the cash at the end of the month for whatever you have used that month. If that sounds like a lot, it might be. But for small site, it should not cost you more than $7/mo. Be sure to use the Usage Tool in your Cloudfront’s console to keep track of monthly bandwidth during your trial. This way you could find out how much it costs when the free lunch is over.

Lastly, Amazon Cloudfron is the most generous guy in the room which gives you one whole year of free trial just to make sure you’re totally hooked. And it worked on me. I was with Amazon Cloudfront for additional three years before I started to to find another CDN provider only because Cloudfront got a little too expensive for me at that point.

Alright, onto the next feature.

Push Origin

This is a method of uploading content from your website to the CDN servers done by your own server, as opposed to Pull Origin where the CDN server retrieves your content automatically upon request.

Hence, Push Origin means content that already existed on CDN servers, only get updated when your host sends new files to overwrite them; while Pull method extracts and replaces the data more often as they expire. Unless you are running an online podcast, video streaming blog or media oriented website dealing with heavy files, you definitely do not worry about having a Push Origin option from your CDN.

Data Purging: Another feature worth mentioning is the ability to Purge cached content on the CDN servers. Cloudfront has a tool that you can use to schedule a single or mutiple-file invalidation, forcing the server to retrieve fresh data from your own host upon new request. It however does not allow you to purge all files at once.

Everyone else on the list supports Purge All and Instant Purge of cache. It’s a little stretch for BunnyCDN to call it Instant Purge but it’ll take 5 minutes for the baby rabbit to completely remove your content on all of their servers. KeyCDN and Amazon Cloudfront definitely have the the Instant Purge capability due to the support for Dynamic Content Delivery –we’ll talk about this in a moment.

Dynamic Content Delivery

One last thing that might be important to those who have a high-traffic website is Dynamic Content Delivery. It’s a server capability to cache content that has been generated on the fly by your website, such as URL that has query strings. Normally most CDN could only cache static content such as your photos, your Javascript files, css etc…leaving dynamic content uncached, eating up your host’s resources and slowing down load speed.

KeyCDN has a very great article on this subject if you are interested. There are also couple WordPress plugins for KeyCDN that allows full site cache on KeyCDN POPs, which understandably should speed up the delivery of your site by a whole lot more.

2. The Setup

It’s about time to put these guys in a test. Here’s how I’m going to set up the environment:

I will use no site other than Custom PC Guide.net because it’s currently hosted on a Cloud VPS and fully optimized for the best performance possible. This is to make sure it doesn’t affect or interfere the CDN speed in anyway. This setup is based on the Cloud VPS guide that we went over last week @ A poor man’s story to 300% faster websites via Cloud VPS.

From here, I will create Pull Zone from each of the four CDN contenders. Finally, we run tests on GTmetrix and Pingdom and examine the waterfall chart to discover the average load times of every one of these CDNs after 3 runs. Let’s see who’s the boss.

3. Pull Zone Preparation

+ KeyCDN
So, KeyCDN takes a while to complete the caching process of Custom PC Guide.net. However, there is nothing to complain about. Adding a new zone is ridiculously easy. The interface is clean, simple and intuitive. I’m just sitting here waiting for KeyCDN to deploy the my zone. Since CPG is on a https connection, once this done I’m going to click that SSL button right away to enable https for the CDN too.

Now here’s a problem for those who’s not so tech savyy. In order to use SSL, you must configure a new CNAME for your subdomain to point to KeyCDN’s zone URL –it is mandatory at KeyCDN. This establishes a secured connection between the subdomain and KeyCDN servers.

+ BunnyCDN
BunnyCDN finished my new Pull Zone so quickly that I nearly missed the screenshot. It was 100% by the time I looked up. Setting up the zone is a breeze, too. It looks like BunnyCDN provides me a https url already, so I do not have to make a new CNAME record to get SSL anymore.

+ Amazon Cloudfront
Amazon Cloudfront could be the more difficult one to setup due to so many details needed at the beginning. Those who are new to Cloudfront probably feel a little overwhelmed from all the options, like when you go to a Chinese restaurant and look at the 67-page menu for half an hour then give up and call for eggdrop soup, vegetable spring rolls and orange chicken with white rice.

In term of SSL, you can obtain https via the shared certificate of cloudfront.net (you use something like d2pjkmg335qfp5.cloudfront.net) or you can create your own CNAME for a subdomain (something like cache.custompcguide.net), which is more complicated to setup at Cloudfront than at BunnyCDN or KeyCDN.

Still, on a scale from 1 to 10 it’s a 5 when put side by side with BelugaCDN’s SSL installation.

+ BelugaCDN
BelugaCDN caught me off guard by asking for a CNAME configuration right away. No problem, since I already have CPG domain on Cloudflare, adding a new record is just a 2-second work. But for those who don’t, it might be a little too challenging at the start.

When it comes to SSL setup, I don’t find a one-click automatic SSL installation like what I found on BunnyCDN and KeyCDN, thus this is an additonal step and a tough one on our end to make https works for the site. You will need to visit Let’s Encrypt to obtain the certificate by running Certbot python script on your host and manually paste that into BelugaCDN’s settings. Not a tough job for those who have free account on Runcloud/ServerPilot and ran a manual letsencrypt SSL script before.

Other than that, the interface is clean and simple. However, the look-and-feel is a little too bright for my taste so I edited it a little to make things easier for the eyes.

4. The Tests

Now that all the zones from each and every CDN provider are ready. Let’s put them into the tests.

a. Amazon Cloudfront

1st run @ GTmetrix
The first run is when CDN server first time pulls the content from your site. It’s considered to be the slowest because the content has never been cached before.

For this test in general, we’re using GTmetrix to benchmark the site. GTmetrix’s server is located in Vancouver, Canada.

Amazon did a 3.6s run on the test. That’s decent.

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2nd run @ GTmetrix

Second run is much better.

Load speed dropped from 3.6s to a solid 2.0s. Actual load speed is 1.58s. The result shows higher timing because I have an ajax call on the site that runs after the page has finished loading, which prolongs the active loading stage. I didn’t know what caused the admin-ajax.php to run but later found out it was the meta that somehow made GTmetrix pulled the second page for no reason.

That aside, the CDN takes roughly 250ms to response. It’s impressive because keep in mind the request server is actually in Vancouver, Canada.

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3rd run @ GTmetrix

Average response time of Cloudfront server has reduced to a mere ~150ms. As the result, the site total load time now is 1.8s with an actual load time of 1.3s. Very good!

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4th run @ Pingdom
This test is performed by Pingdom benchmark tool. The server is located in New York city. Load time is 482ms! Looking at the waterfall chart, the Cloudfront took an average of 50ms to establish the connection. Can’t beat that.

Just kidding, it just beat itself on the re-run of this test (450ms).

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5th run @ Pingdom
This time we switch the test server to Stockholm, Sweden and the result is still amazing at 1.68s. Can it beat that again? Yes, 790ms.

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6th run @ Pingdom

An extra test from the Australia server. Cloudfront helps the site load right at 1.98s.

c. KeyCDN

CPG currently sits on a https connection, that means I have to make a new CNAME record (as a requirement on KeyCDN) to have SSL certificate installed on my zone. I wish KeyCDN provided a https on the original zone URL like BunnyCDN/Cloudfront for those who do not know how to make CNAME or don’t want to use CNAME for their CDN.

The setup for SSL however, is ridiculously easy. Select “letsencrypt” from the SSL setting, click Save. Done. Absolutely love it! It’s nothing compared to BelugaCDN’s SSL setup because that process is surely a nightmare for non-tech savvy person.

I ran into several issue with the DNS and SSL certificate with KeyCDN.

First, even though KeyCDN’s own DNS propagation tool reported that CNAME record of my subdomain was done correctly and resolved successfully world wide, I had trouble adding Zonealias in KeyCDN control panel. I contacted customer service and several hours later, this was the response:

After that, I ran into another issue with KeyCDN SSL certificate that was denying access from Custom PC Guide.net. This also resolved an hour later. In short, I think 50% of this problem was my fault as I was impatient with the process. The other 99% is definitely KeyCDN’s fault.

I also ran the third issue where fonts were not loaded properly on the site, even though CORS policy has been enabled in KeyCDN Zone settings. The 403 error seems like there was an permission issue regarding the anti-hot link option that I was testing earlier. Yet it might still stick after said feature was disabled a long time ago.

From KeyCDN’s track record of testing my patient, I think I’m going to wait it out.

1st run @ GTmetrix

KeyCDN did pretty ok on the first run with a total page load at 4.1s (actual 3s). CDN server responded within 1s for Javascript files and under 400ms for photos.

I hope to see more consistent timeline across all component types in the next run.

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2nd run @ GTmetrix

The second run hit the mark at 5.2s total load (4.22s actual). Some Javascript file took a whooping 2.36s to to finish. Other media files still stay under the 400ms response time.

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3rd run @ GTmetrix

The third run looks a lot more promising, a lot more like it. Overall load time is about 2.4s (actual 2s). Average response time of +/-600ms is now more alignment across all different content types.

I gave it one more run just to be fair. It finally reaches sub 1s mark @ 1.9s from this Canada server. Great job.

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4th run @ Pingdom

On this test from the New York server, KeyCDN pulls a similar score to BunnyCDN at 1.89s. I re-run the test one more time to see how it looks after the CDN server has fully cached the content. The result is ~768ms total load time. It’s great, but still twice as much when compared to Cloudfront and BunnyCDN’s extra run.

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5th run @ Pingdom

• BunnyCDN: 617ms
• KeyCDN: 636ms
• Amazon Cloudfront: 790ms

KeyCDN can finally brag about the little victory it got over Amazon Cloudfront on the Sweden server here .

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6th run @ Pingdom

On the Australia server, KeyCDN does nearly the same as everyone else’s at 2.01s.

6. Cloudflare

There have been many questions regarding the use of Cloudflare free service in place of a true CDN provider. We decided to revisit this guide again and did some benchmarks to find a clear answer. This will get pretty interesting.

Cloudflare Off, CDN On @ 1.4s via GTmetrix

Cloudflare On, CDN On @ 1.7s via GTmetrix

Note that Yslow score is lower, due to cookie-less domain issue. Cloudflare injects CF-cache-status to all files’ header. Regular CDN gives you an option to strip headers on all static files. Not a big deal and that won’t affect load time, but might be an annoyance to folks who are after the perfect score.

Cloudflare On, CDN Off @ 1.8s via GTmetrix

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Cloudflare On, CDN Off @ 1.08s via Pingdom

Cloudflare Off, CDN On @ 993ms via Pingdom

Cloudflare On, CDN On @ 1.09s via Pingdom

As far as the results show, Cloudflare does not perform as fast as paid CDN providers.

However, it is a very small trade off in load time –a few short miliseconds here and there. Without Cloudflare, the site loses that extra DDoS protection comes with the free plan. As you may guess, we vote for the best choice which is having both Cloudflare and your own CDN running to balance security and performance with a big IF: if you have a small site.

There have been a handful of not-so-great experience with Cloudflare from high profile blogs that I came across.

At some point, Cloudflare can only offer Free to so many people and there will be certain consequences no matter how big they become. Someone has to pay for the costs associated with running expensive servers. Many webmasters have voiced their concerns where Cloudflare throttled the transfer speed for their site. Be that, or Cloudflare just has an undisclosed performance cap on the free plan or they were not very reliable under heavy traffic spikes at certain times of the day.

Another issue that was brought to my attention is security and privacy matters between your server and Cloudflare. Remember, nothing is free and it’s extremely expensive to run any servers at a global level like Cloudflare. In such case, you are the product or your data is the new currency on the Internet. Read more about this discussion here on Reddit —Be careful with Cloudflare: privacy, because it may give you a second thought before putting your HTTPS site behind Cloudflare

There, you have just finished one of the Poor Man’s Fast Website series! Thanks for reading and again, please leave a quick comment of which CDN you will be going with. Something along the line of ..”My CDN is the most badass because it’s the only one that can see the end!” haha #showmyselfout #dadjoke #illuminaticonfirmed.