CDN77 – An Extensive Review

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is one of the key technologies that website owners can use to speed up their websites without wasting too much time and resources on optimizing other stuff. There are so many CDN providers in the market now and CDN77 has recently established a name for themselves in this tough industry and is considered to be one of the top CDN providers in the world. Let’s see if the service is worth all the hype.

Page load speeds is one of the over 200 criteria for ranking higher in SERPs set by Google. So it becomes essential for your website to load faster so you can effectively compete with your competitors. An efficient CDN can make this job much easier.

CDN And The How Of It

According to Wikipedia,

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to distribute service spatially relative to end-users to provide high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large fraction of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, and documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks.

Normally what happens is that, you will be hosting your website on a shared server, VPS or Dedicated Server provided by your hosting company. In a setup like this, when a user tries to access your website, the user request is sent to the server in which your website is hosted to load the requested webpage along with all the other required JavaScript and CSS files to deliver the page as it is meant to be. Handling multiple requests of such nature is difficult to be handled by a single server and when there are many people trying to access the webpage, then it would end up loading slow.

However, when we use a CDN service, the request is handled not by one server but by a network of different servers. Requests from the user’s end will go to the CDN Network and based on their location the best route (which is the fastest) is chosen.

So a CDN reduces the load of the host server and improves the page load speeds by distributing the resources to a network of servers located across the world. Let’s take a closer look at CDN77 in particular.

CDN77 Review

CDN77 started in 2012 with just 3 POPs. In 5 years, CDN77 has grown to 33 POPs around the world. From serving a million requests in the first month, they’ve grown to delivering hundreds of millions In an hour. At the moment, they serve over 38,700 websites through their CDN Network.

Features

CDN77 comes with loads of features which are beyond industry standards as well. This gives them a competitive edge in the market. They have a very credible clientele which includes locomotive giant Scania and the European Space Agency. The incredible images that we see from the Hubble telescope comes through CDN77’s servers. They help with you in website acceleration, software distribution and have solutions that can help with your video on demand services, gaming and private CDN. Let’s take a deeper look at the kind of features that CDN77 has.

Top Notch Security With Custom SSL

CDN77 comes with a free SSL certificate and a wide array of options to customize it. You can choose a shared or unshared SSL for free or buy an “A” grade custom SSL certificate by a certified SAN provider. If you already have an SSL certificate, then you can use it for free. SSL helps to improve your website’s security.

Intuitive Control Panel

For a beginner, it’s mind boggling to deal with a new CDN. That’s where CDN77 differs.  You will get access to a fully managed control panel where you can take care of your billing structure, CDN resources, and other required settings. There are options to check website traffic and the settings can be customized based on that data for better optimization thus improving how the user experiences the site. The whole control panel has a very sleek UI and is easy to get used to.

Pricing

CDN77 offers a very interesting pricing structure where you can pay as per your usage, which sets it apart from other market rivals and this sort of a pricing structure is one of their unique selling points.

There is no minimum monthly caps. If you are using less than 5 TB, then the price is at $0.049 per GB and if you use more than 5 TB the price per GB drops even further. You can also choose a fixed monthly plan if you are expecting a set monthly usage. This is much cheaper and the overages are also very affordable in case if the usage crosses your estimation.

Overall CDN77 is priced very competitively while not compromising on any features they provide, compared to the rest of the CDN industry

Brotli

Brotli is the latest compression algorithm introduced by Google that succeeded Zopfli (another compression algorithm). Based on Google’s tests, Brotli improves compression by around 20-26%. Using this would reduce the total amount of bandwidth handled and thus it reduces your CDN charges by around 20-26% as well.

Worldwide Distribution

CDNs are more useful, the more distributed they are depending on your website’s traffic locations. You will be able choose from a wide array of over 32 edge data centers spread around the world. There are options to enable or disable particular data centers if you wish to for various reasons. CDN77 also provide regular status updates of their data centers, so that you can make sure that your website’s content delivery process isn’t affected.

Unlimited CDN Resources

CDN77 is uniquely positioned in the market by providing unlimited CDN resources. Apart from that, CDN77 also allows you to purge the entire CDN or prefetch files as per your wish. CDN77 allows you to update cache expiry limits on your own.

Support

They have a thorough knowledge base set in place, so you can check it out in case you find yourself struggling with something. If you are the kind of person who likes to deal with issues with some personal support, then CDN77 got you covered in that as well. They provide 24/7 support through online chat, Skype, phone and via email as well. CDN77 is a customer-friendly establishment whose engineers would love to support you through your issues, in case you have any.

Conclusion

CDN77 improves main parameters like Page Size and HTTP requests sent from the user end to procure all the necessary files. These factors improve page load speeds by a large margin.

Based on my experience with CDN77, I found it to be a really useful CDN service provider and would definitely recommend it to my readers who are looking to improve the efficiency of their websites. Hope this review helped you in making a decision. Let us know if you have any doubts in the comments and we will be glad to help you out.

If you’d like to try CDN77 for yourself, you can use their 14-day trial for free.