Which CDN provider is fastest ? How does MaxCDN rate for you ?

This site uses MaxCDN for static file serving as it’s the best price per gigabyte CDN provider I have found.  There are many other CDN providers out there with varying CDN prices and minimum bandwidth purchase amounts. MaxCDN has been criticised for having no Asian pops of presences (POPs) – or what they term as Edge or Peer locations.

But in fact they do have Asian Edge locations, just not enabled by default as they have a different price scaling for Asian bandwidth due to the much higher bandwidth costs in Asia and Australia. You need to request MaxCDN to enable their Asian Edge locations which will have a slightly higher per gigabyte cost than the default CDN bandwidth. Default bandwidth costs for US/Europe range between US$0.02 to US$0.07/GB versus Asia range between US$0.042 to US$0.11/GB and there’s a monthly charge of US$10/month per CDN pull zone to enable MaxCDN Asia Edge locations and it includes the first 100GB/month of Asia Edge bandwidth.

I emailed MaxCDN support to get some clarification, it seems MaxCDN Asia Edge option can only be enabled on your entire MaxCDN account, so if you have 3x pull zones in your MaxCDN account, to enable Asia Edge bandwidth it will cost 3x US$10 = US$30/month which includes first 100GB/month of Asian CDN bandwidth which equates to US$0.30/GB for first 100GB. If you have 5x pull zones it will cost 5x US$10 = US$50/month for first 100GB/month of Asian CDN bandwidth which equates to US$0.50/GB for first 100GB. Then excess Asian CDN bandwidth ranges from US$0.042/GB to US$0.11/GB. I currently have 5x pull zones in my MaxCDN account so to enable MaxCDN Asia Edge location for first 250GB of Asian CDN bandwidth, it would cost approximately US$50/month + US$16.50 (150GB x US$0.11) = US$66.50/month which works out to be US$0.266/GB which is nearly 3-13x times MaxCDN’s non-Asian bandwidth but maybe cheaper or more dearer than alternatives such as EdgeCast CDN which would be around US$0.18/GB to US$0.35/GB with much same or higher minimum monthly bandwidth commitments.

For CDN testing, I came across Cloudclimate.com, they have a CDN speed test page which measures the speed of a file download 10x times from the visitors location and averages it out. I’m located in Brisbane, Australia so was expecting that MaxCDN without an Asian Edge locations would be slower, but was surprised to see it fairs pretty well compared to the rest of the CDN providers tested against.

They include, Maxcdn,  Cloudfront,  Akamai,  Gogrid,  Edgecast,  Softlayer,  Internap,  Rackspace Cloud,  Azure,  Highwinds,  Cachefly,  Voxcast,  Cloudflare,  Level3,  Cotendo,  Amazon Cloud,  Flexiscale Cloud,  Voxel Cloud, and Joyent Cloud. All CDN providers with faster speeds, cost between 2x to 10x more per gigabyte compared to MaxCDN though. So pretty happy with my choice of CDN provider.  Pair a good CDN provider together with DNS Made Easy’s IP Anycast CDN services, and you’ll be set in terms of optimal web site page loading speed and response times.

 Cloudclimate.com CDN provider speed test to Brisbane, Australia